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 This week's article is about the widely known and popular noise reduction tool - the Noise Ninja. It is used as both a standalone program and a plug-in to different image editors. Noise Ninja, differently from other noise-reduction tools here, has more noise reducing tools and options that will be covered in the article.
In dealing with the noise in the image Noise Ninja takes into account the camera and/or the image itself. It is the 1st step of the workflow to build the noise profile. A set of camera profiles can be loaded from the tool's manufacturer site or you can set the camera specifications manually.
But Noise Ninja can also build image profile by analyzing the image itself. This way is said to be less effective because of the textures and too much detail in some color areas though.
Once the profile is ready we go to the noise filter. Here there are two sets of controls - standard and color selective. Color selective lets us work with separate colors and reducing noise in them only.
Standard controls work with luminance noise and color noise, while sharpness controls set the unsharp mask parameters.
Additional controls treat low frequency noise (Coarse noise) and allow to have quicker result at an expense of some quality (usually the difference can't be seen).
The Preview can be toggled on and off and dragged all over the image. It is automatically updated at every change in the settings. The filtering settings can be saved for later use. The previously saved ones can be loaded. All of this works well with a series of images.
When the result seen in the preview is satisfying enough you press the 'remove noise' button to apply the changes to the whole image. But after the noise reduction is performed Noise Ninja offers a touch up tool for fine tuning the results of the filtering - the Noise brush. This tool can reverse the filtering result in desired areas or apply them anew. Noise brush is usually useful with textures and fine detail. The tool is also good for working in different channels.
That's another option of Noise Ninja absent in most of the other noise reduction tools. Noise Ninja allows reducing of noise in two chroma and three color channels separately.
And finally, Noise Ninja has a batch processor for processing images in groups. Batch processor only applies noise filter settings to images; the fine-tuning is available afterwards with the Noise Brush.
Below you can see the examples of Noise Ninja application to the images. We only used default settings for the test.
In the boat picture the filtered variant has distinct dark edge lines resulted from Unsharp Mask application. They are mostly well seen in light areas. But the noise is gone, and as there's not much texture, it works very well.
Noise Ninja can be parchursed for the price of $34.95 (Home Standalone) or $44,95 (Home bundle) or downloaded for evaluation at www.picturecode.com.
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