Noise Ninja Help

Phyxius

Okay, so I'm not hoping for a miracle and I'm sure there's not much that can be done...but I apparently don't understand Noise Ninja...

So, this was shot at ISO 1600, at 2.8 with a shutter speed of 1/500 @ 200mm with an adjustment in ACR of...eek +2. I could have slowed it down a little and possibly still have gotten a blur free image...but I didn't.

Is there any hope for this image?


http://phyxius.smugmug.com/photos/190363622-O.jpg

What happens when I try noise ninja -

http://phyxius.smugmug.com/photos/190363581-O.jpg

And, I just tried a demo version of Nik Software Dfine

http://phyxius.smugmug.com/photos/190371254-O.jpg

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated!! :scratch

LAB.rat

First state your problem... ;-)

Do you find it was overdone, or not enough?

I don't find either one that bad, it's more the general atmosphere that could use post-processing, and you should have photographed it with a smaller DOF.

Also the final output matters. For printing you can get away with more noise and you probably should to keep detail.

I don't know if these programs use edge/surface masks internally, but that's another option to explore and apply before denoising (I have no experience with those but here are actions for them: www.thelightsrightstudio.com/TLREdge&SurfaceMasks.htm)

digismile

You probably understand Noise Ninja just fine. Your real issue is your starting point, an underexposed, high ISO photo where you significantly increased the exposure in post.

Noise Ninja (as do most similar programs) do a good job, straight up, no adjustments. I'm not sure what version you are using, but you should be using NN and a custom profile from PictureCode specific to your Camera and ISO. You can also create your own profiles. But in this case, not much of that matters ...

Basically, the program will try to smooth out all the color noise and convert it too what it thinks the predominant color is in that area. Although this gets rid of a lot a speckled color areas in this photo, it doesn't leave you with much detail. It almost looks like a painted water color.

Your issue is that you started with an underexposed photo. This is what I'd try. Not necessarily a guarantee for success, but I've been able to get satisfactory results with extremely undeexposed photos. I don't know what your PS skills are, so this is a just something fairly simple to try.

1. Open the photo and only increase the exposure if you really need it for detail. If it is adding significant noise, don't increase so much.

2. Do you have CS3? If so, try the Shadow/Highlight Adjustment. If you don't, no worries. The Shadow/Highlight can be reasonably replicated in about 20-30 complicated steps, so we won't try that today. Instead, duplicate your background layer and change the new layer from Normal to something like Screen or Lighten.

3. It can look pretty awful at this point, so bring down the opacity to 10-30%, just enough to give a bit of exposure improvement.

4. Now duplicate this layer (Ctrl-J). This will further add to the previous layer. You can add as many of these layers as you want if it seems to be increasing the exposure and not adding too much noise.

5. At this point, you hopefully will have a better starting point that before. Now create a flattened layer of all the layers below (CTRL-ALT-SHFT-E). With this layer, you should now do whatever color adjustments, contrast adjustments you would have done before (setting white/black points, using levels or curves, etc). Basically you want to get the photo to the point where you can run Noise Ninja on the final adjusted photo. Don't run NN before any of your other adjustments.

All these steps did was hopefully increase the detail/exposure a bit at a time, instead of one fell swoop upon opening.

I think your results with Noise Ninja was pretty good, considering the starting point. Hopefully this will give you something to experiment with, to give you a better starting point.

Regards,

pathfinder

Badly under exposed digital images are noisy. Noise Ninja, Neat Image, Noiseware etc all work better on a properly exposed image of course.. A 2 stop push means that you were shooting at ISO 6400. Very little data to be found there.

Could you have added flash here for a bit more light?

LAB.rat

digismile wrote:

2. Do you have CS3? If so, try the Shadow/Highlight Adjustment.

Shadow/Highlight is there starting from CS1.

"Fill Light" starting from ACR 4 (I think...).

CatOne

None of these things (Shadow/Highlight, or "Fill light" in Lightroom) are going to affect the key problem, namely one of noise.

The noise is in the photo, so bringing it to proper exposure is going to show it. Noise Ninja is among the best at removing the noise -- it's possible that if you created an explicit noise profile for your exact camera that NN could do a little bit better job. Look into how to create profiles for your exact camera.

That said, the two adjusted images aren't going to get TONS better -- it's not like you will ever make it look like you shot it at ISO 100 with proper exposure. Only way to do that is to go back and shoot it again... maybe send out an announcement to all the participants

LAB.rat

CatOne wrote:

None of these things (Shadow/Highlight, or "Fill light" in Lightroom) are going to affect the key problem, namely one of noise.

Most of the time, they will affect it for sure, it just won't get any better

Knight

Hi Phyxius may i take a shot at correcting your photo . I have Noise Ninja and a few other PS plug-ins that may help your photo. I would post the results here for you or just send the file to you directly.