|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Neat Image
Best noise reduction for digital cameras and scanners
What is Neat Image?
Neat Image is computer software that removes digital noise from photographic images and also performs other image quality improvements.
Neat Image is available as a standalone application for Windows, OS X, and Linux, and also as a plugin for Photoshop (Windows, OS X).
Neat Image improves digital photos from cameras, scanned negative and positive films as well as scanned printed photos.
Neat Image works as a special-purpose digital filter. Our filter is specifically designed to reduce visible noise in digital photographic images. In digital camera shots, image noise generally comes from two key sources: random nature of the captured light and imperfect nature of image sensor and camera circuitry, especially in high ISO modes. In scanned images from legacy sources, silver halide grain from high speed film is the main source of noise.
Wherever your images come from, Neat Image can deliver beautiful images with noise and grain notably reduced. Digital images taken with any equipment, processed with Neat Image, will often look as though they were taken under optimal conditions with more expensive gear. Scanned archive images and prints can look contemporary, and can be as grain- and pattern-free as possible. Neat Image greatly improves the visual quality of digital images by reducing the objectionable noise and grain and at the same time preserving the true image details.
Neat Image effectively reduces these kinds of noise:
When can Neat Image help?
Neat Image improves image quality by reducing noise, when you have no control over the shooting conditions or the origin of the images.
As an experienced photographer, you know how to minimize noise in your photos. You use a top quality camera. You select moderate, not high ISO settings. You use a tripod so that you can take sharper pictures with longer exposures. You can choose to shoot still or slowly moving subjects.
But these optimal conditions don’t apply to many real life photography situations. Whether you’re a professional paid by the shot, or you’re an experienced amateur who wants exhibition quality images, you’ll always need better quality from less than ideal shooting situations.
That’s where Neat Image comes in. It cleans and enhances images taken from real life.
Action, children, wildlife and high-speed photos
Your photographic subjects that are always on the move demand high shutter speeds, if you wish to capture the subject clearly. So you increase your shutter speed. Generally, increased shutter speeds mean that your ISO setting will need to increase. Hello, image noise.
Neat Image minimizes this common source of image noise and makes these action shots even better with noise free clarity.
Available light (no flash) photography
Sometimes you just can’t use flash. Or you may not even want it. Available light photography sets moods that flash can’t reproduce. And many public spaces such as museums, churches, some public exhibitions, and some zoos all prohibit flash photography. Or you may need to respect nocturnal wildlife by using available light. In all of these situations, you’ll need to boost the ISO speed rating of your camera, and that means image noise. Neat Image will help you create great images anyway.
Compact cameras with small sensors
The majority of photos nowadays are taken with smartphones, tablets, action cameras, and compact cameras (known as point-and-shoots) — all of which have fairly small image sensors. Unlike digital SLRs and high end cameras, these devices very often take images that suffer from noise, even in relatively good conditions. Even shooting indoors or in overcast weather can create noisy images. Moderate ISO rates of 400 or 800 used by a compact camera will result in photos with very noticeable noise. Neat Image will recover such photos and restore image details clouded by noise and unwanted artifacts.
Night shots and time lapse photography
When very long exposure times are used, noise levels in resulting images increase dramatically, even when using low ISO rates. Astro-photography, night landscape, cityscape photography, and time-lapse photography are the types of shots that can be impacted by this noise. The reason for this is that the camera sensor temperature increases during long exposures, which boosts the noise levels in resulting images even when using low ISO rates. Neat Image not only reduces the noise in long time exposure images, but also retains the fine details captured in these detailed shots.
Narrow aperture shots (high F-stops)
Small aperture values provide sharp and deep focus. At the same time, high F-stop settings geometrically limit the amount of light captured. This fact forces the photographer to use longer exposures or higher ISO rates, especially when the scene is not adequately lit. As a result, these photos show more noise at the same time that the photographer wants to emphasize sharpness and depth of field. Neat Image makes these images look clean and sharp.
Using an incorrect shooting mode by mistake
Today’s digital cameras are almost infinitely flexible, with many modes, ranges, and settings. But, that flexibility means that your camera can be left set to a shooting mode or given settings that don’t fit the current conditions. So you may grab your camera for a once-in-a-lifetime shot — and find that the ISO was set ridiculously high for the conditions, or you had unnecessary exposure compensation set. Later, when you adjust the brightness and contrast of such shots after the fact, you’ll see the result — high levels of grain. Neat Image can repair your mistakes by minimizing grain, and give you back the shot that you wish you’d taken.
Compression artifacts, film and photo grain, and other imperfections
Besides removing sensor noise, Neat Image excels at removing other types of unwanted patterns that reduce image quality. JPEG images can suffer from “blocky” noise patterns — these are known as compression artifacts, and are created when JPEG compression of an image is too aggressive. Scanned images — either positive (slide) film or negatives, or printed photos that are scanned — may show obvious grain from the film. And some printed images that are scanned from commercial materials such as brochures can contain patterns created by the offset printing process. Neat Image can reduce and minimize noise from these sources. This is why Neat Image is widely used by professionals in archiving, digitizing and image restoration.
How can Neat Image help me shoot?
Neat Image allows you to produce more usable, high-quality images with your current digital photo gear. Whatever cameras you own, Neat Image improves your shots as though you upgraded your equipment. How? Neat Image reduces the visible “grain” — the multicolored specks of electronic noise — in your pictures — so they aren't noticeable. Without sacrificing image details or quality.
Image noise affects every camera
Whether you're an amateur with a point-and-shoot camera, or a professional photographer whose shooting demands the most advanced, expensive equipment — you'll always run into image noise challenges.
If you use a consumer grade camera or a cellphone camera, even moderately high ISO settings of 400 will produce noise in your images. The conditions don't have to be very challenging at all to create noise. Shots taken with point-and-shoots under indoor room lighting can show this noise. Your camera may not indicate the ISO setting that it used, and you'll probably have very little control over the ISO anyway.
A premium camera, on the other hand, may create noise-free images under those conditions. But the challenging shooting situations that made you choose your high end camera will create their own image noise issues. High ISO settings, such as 3200 or more, to take action shots, or to take pictures in very low light, will produce significant noise.
How Neat Image helps you
Neat Image is made for experts and enthusiasts — like you — who demand a tool that gives them complete control over noise in their images.
When you have Neat Image in your toolbox, your picture taking options expand. You'll produce more publishable, high quality images in a wider variety of available light situations. This means more production and higher profits for the pro photographer. Clearer memories for the advanced amateur. And for every type of photographer, more usable images you can be proud of.
Neat Image post processing supports the challenging photography situations that you encounter in real life. High ISO settings, fast shutter speeds, and very long exposures will all produce better images with far less image noise when you use Neat Image.
How does Neat Image work?
Neat Image uses sophisticated math to tell noise from image details and to selectively reduce only noise while preserving the actual details. Its reduction algorithms are developed specifically for digital photography applications by a highly-qualified professional image processing research group. These algorithms surpass the quality of all classic noise reduction methods and even that of the wavelet-based methods. Although the wavelet-based methods were developed only 15–20 years ago and are still considered relatively modern, Neat Image uses an even newer and more efficient approach to noise reduction. This approach enables drawing a more clear distinction between noise and details in noisy images. This helps Neat Image reduce more noise and better preserve true details in digital photos and scans.
Neat Image builds and uses device noise profiles to adapt noise reduction to imaging device. A device noise profile is a reusable analysis of noise properties of an image acquisition device (a digital camera, scanner, etc.) working in a certain mode. Using a noise profile for an imaging device in effect makes Neat Image noise reduction custom-tailored to this imaging device. Device noise profile is a novel concept originally introduced by Neat Image team and supported by Neat Image user community who create noise profiles for many digital cameras and scanners.
If noise profiles for a specific camera are not yet added to our profile library, Neat Image will still be able to clean photos from that camera using the built-in Auto Profile function, which provides the easiest and quickest way to automatically build a noise profile in just one click.
Neat Image is also very fast because it is thoroughly optimized for parallel processing on multi-core CPUs and GPUs (NVIDIA CUDA and AMD OpenCL). In particular, Neat Image can use all available cores in multi-core processors as well as all processors in multiprocessor systems. Using a graphical accelerator can increase speed even more, especially when the GPU is used in conjunction with CPU or multiple GPUs are utilized. Depending on filtration parameters and available hardware, Neat Image is capable of filtering 30-70 megapixels a second or more on a modern computer.
What people say about Neat Image
Features
Highest-quality noise reduction and sharpening
Neat Image is programmed to filter noise more effectively, and preserving more image details, than current research has indicated is possible. A recent development in noise reduction that is usually regarded as state of the art is wavelet-based denoising. However, Neat Image uses an even more efficient proprietary approach to noise reduction. Our noise filtering method distinguishes more effectively between noise and details in noisy images than wavelet denoising. As a result, Neat Image reduces noise better and preserves more true details in digital photographs.
Neat Image provides you with direct control over all noise filter settings. You can adjust the noise level estimation and specify how much of the detected noise must be removed for every color channel component and spatial frequency component of input image. The default filter settings work very well for most images. But if you want to tweak the filter settings, then all the controls are directly available.
Neat Image provides an intelligent sharpening filter. This sharpening filter works together with the noise filter to avoid noise, and makes the actual image details look sharper without any degradation of image quality (which is usually inevitable with noisy images). Neat Image sharpening also has a halo-free mode which reduces halos that tend to appear along edges in images which are sharpened.
Besides regular 8-bit images (like most JPEGs), the Pro edition of Neat Image also supports 16-bit and 32-bit per channel format in both RGB and grayscale images. This allows Neat Image to process higher bit depth images from modern DSLRs without loss of accuracy, support HDR workflow using 32-bit data, and integrate better with modern image editors like Photoshop CC.
Neat Image can take good advantage of your computer’s graphics hardware and multi-core capabilities. We process images faster on computers with modern NVIDIA GPUs supporting CUDA technology and also with certain OpenCL-capable AMD/ATI GPUs. In addition, Neat Image can use multiple GPUs and combine the computation power of GPUs with regular multi-core CPU for maximum performance.
Device noise profiles
Neat Image produces better noise reduction by being aware of your imaging equipment. Neat Image uses device noise profiles which are reusable analyses of noise properties of a particular image acquisition device — such as a digital camera or a scanner — working in a certain mode. The noise profile makes Neat Image noise reduction custom-tailored for example to a specific digital camera and specific shooting mode. This provides the highest accuracy of noise reduction for images produced by that camera.
Neat Image can automatically make necessary noise analysis of the input image from your camera or scanner to build a custom noise profile specifically for this image.
You can also manually select a featureless image area for noise analysis and let Neat Image do the rest automatically.
Neat Image includes a special Calibration Target to shoot a series of test shots and then automatically build noise profiles for the whole set using the Batch Profiler. This helps you easily develop your own set of profiles for your digital camera (or scanner).
Profile library contains many free pre-built sets of noise profiles for digital cameras and scanners prepared by Neat Image users and shared with the community.
When a ready-made profile set is available, Neat Image can automatically select the profile that best matches the input image based on its EXIF data with the help of the Auto Match feature. This capability is especially useful in batch processing and Photoshop actions.
Photoshop plug-in and standalone application
Neat Image is available as a standalone application. You do not have to be a user of any particular image editor to make your images look cleaner, sharper, better. Just download Neat Image standalone — available for Windows, OS X, and Linux — and you can start improving your image library right away.
Neat Image is also available as a plugin for Photoshop (or Photoshop Elements, or another compatible editor). Neat Image is fully integrated with Photoshop: you can apply noise reduction exactly where it is required: in a layer, channel or selection. Using Photoshop's selection tools, you can apply noise reduction with different strength to different parts of the image. You can use Neat Image Pro plug-in as a smart filter in Photoshop CS3 or newer.
Any file format supported by the plug-in host can be processed by the Neat Image plug-in. For example, you can open a PSD, TIFF, JPEG, JPEG2000, RAW, DNG, etc., image in Photoshop and then directly process it with the Neat Image plug-in. This streamlines the use of Neat Image noise reduction in your workflow.
Actions and batch processing
Neat Image standalone
Save time, increase production and reduce errors by taking advantage of Neat Image’s batch processing capabilities. Create several filtration tasks (one task is one input image) and let Neat Image process the tasks one after another. You can create such tasks manually one by one or automatically using the Batch tool.
Don’t let image processing take over your workflow. Neat Image can automatically process batches of images in the background. Meanwhile you can still use Neat Image to prepare new images and batches, manually process individual images, or verify processing results. You can also use other applications, too, since Neat Image behaves nicely in a multi-task environment.
Photoshop plug-in
Neat Image is integrated with Photoshop’s actions. You can record a Photoshop action with Neat Image plug-in and later automatically re-apply (or play) it to other images. Neat Image behavior in actions is fully configurable.
Neat Image is integrated with Photoshop’s batch processing. Once you have recorded Neat Image into a Photoshop action, you can use that action in Photoshop's batch processing to automatically process many images.
Instant visual feedback
Neat Image provides instant feedback of filtering results so you can achieve just the appearance you need. When adjusting the filter settings, you can immediately see the preview results in any area if the selected image or in the whole visible part of the image. You can manually select any area or just move across the image and zoom in to specific parts to get a better feeling of how the filtered image will look like as compared with the original.
Per-channel and per-frequency preview modes help to identify most noisy components that require special attention. You can adjust the filter settings corresponding to those components and immediately see the results.
© Copyright 2000-2023 COGITO SOFTWARE CO.,LTD. All rights reserved
