Neat Image noise reduction tool

Neat image noise reduction tool has the flexibility of being used both as standalone program and as an image editor plug-in. As complex as its noise reduction algorithms can be the workflow of the program is smooth and easy and contains only four steps.

Workflow

First of all you load an image into the program and it reads the exif information.

Secondly Neat Image is trying to automatically define the image noise profile by taking the uniform enough sample of the image.
There are, in fact, several way of defining a profile. You can define it manually, for example. The area you choose for profiling shouldn’t contain any important detail and the program will warn you if there are too many.

You should also be careful enough with choosing the pattern for the profile depending on the important parts of the image. For example, like in the image below, if you need to remove noise from the dark figure than from the light sky you should take the pattern from the darker areas.

Neat image can also take camera profile from its database, or you can save the profile from a previous image (in those cases then there’s not enough uniform areas in the filtered image).
Third screen brings to you noise filter settings. Noise level and noise amount can be specified in chroma and luma parts. Plus sharpening is available. The instant preview can be seen by selecting an area of the image.

Final screen lets you apply the filters to the whole image. Here you still can compare the before and after image states and return to the previous step if necessary. Neat image saves images to tiff, jpg, and bmp formats.

Quality

Let us now see the results of the Neat Image application to the pictures.

As you see from the examples above Neat image can do its job very fine. It deals good with both luma and chroma noises well, it can reduce jpg artifacts even. But care should be takien with using it on the images with a lot of detail and, especialy, faces. With default noise amount settings the people can easily turn into plastic dolls. The fine detail can be lost; the slightly unsharp edges can filter into background. The textures are also slightly blurred.

On the whole, though, if you don’t overdo the filtering with people Neat Image is a good and very useful program easy to work with and not overly expensive.

You can buy Neat Image at neatimage.com site in several editions - from free Demo to $74.90 Pro+ edition.