Remove digital noise with Noiseware

Today's digital cameras allow photographers to take great photos in low-light conditions with a minimum of effort. To accomplish this, the camera boosts the light sensitivity, or ISO rating, for the photo. There is a penalty to pay for this. That that penalty is a noisy photo.

Digital photo noise can be characterized by tiny dot patterns throughout the photo. Although this can be appealing to some (making it seem more like film grain) it can be distracting to others. To remedy this, there have been a lot of products that attempt to clean up a noisy photo. Noiseware from Imagenomic is one of those products, and it's one of the easiest I've ever used.

Noiseware exists to accomplish one task. That task is to remove noise from your photos and make them look the best they can. Noiseware does so with quality and simplicity. Anyone from professionals to hobbyists can use this product to clean up their photos.

Noiseware exists in two variations. One option is a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, and the other is simply a standalone client that does the noise removal on its own. There are also standard and professional versions of both, and they only differ in their feature sets. I'll touch on that later. For this review, I looked at the standalone Professional version as seen in Figure A.

Simplicity is key

The client is neatly laid out in three columns. The left side can show the noise filter settings, and EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) data or the noise profile. The center of the screen shows the image you are manipulating, and the right side shows the image browser or batch processing options. A toolbar along the top of the client allows you to effectively mix and match what components are showing at a given time.

To use noise removal on an image, click the Open button or choose File, Open from the File menu. Once the file is opened, you can click Go in the noise filter area. The program will go to work cleaning up your image with default settings. Once it completes, you can click on the image itself to toggle between the before and after results.

If everything looks good, simply Save your photo and you're done. It really is that simple. This process alone will give you great results the majority of the time. I honestly think this is good enough for most people, but if you want the ability to tweak the results, you have the myriad of options as shown in Figure B.

One such tweak in the Professional version is the ability to use different noise removal presets as opposed to the simple "Default" option. You have options such as Landscape, Night Scene and Portrait that will affect your picture in appropriate manner. You can also set it to "Custom", which allows you to tweak all the settings as seen above.

When you are using the "Custom" settings, make a change then simply hit the Go button. The software will undo all of the previous settings and re-process your image. If you would rather not hit the Go button each time, you can turn the Preview function on. This will automatically start to apply your changes to the preview image as you make them. Some changes do take a second or two, so a status bar in the bottom left corner shows you how far along the software is in updating the preview image.

The results, even by simply using default, are excellent. To test, I took an ISO 1600 photo of a rabbit at 1/125 of a second at an aperture f5.6. This was an 8.1 megapixel image from a Canon 20D. Figure C shows the before and after results at a 100% crop near the top of the rabbit's head. The effects are most noticeable on the background, and on the inside of the rabbit's ear. I simply took the JPEG image and processed it using the default settings.

The software also compiles internal data every time you use it. It uses EXIF data embedded in your photos to build an on-going profile to improve results. So theoretically, the more you use the software, the better your results will get.

At this time, there are no pre-built profiles available for various camera or scanner models, but the Imagenomic Web site states that the feature is coming soon to the Professional version. This will allow you to choose a profile based what camera model and ISO settings you used on a particular photo. This should make the already excellent results that much better.

To round out the package, the software includes a basic file browser as well as batch processing capabilities. If you need to remove the noise from a bunch of photos, the batch processor does an admirable job.

Standard versus Pro

There are a few things that differentiate the Standard and Professional versions of the software. The first is embedded ICC color profile support. If your photo has an ICC profile embedded in it, the Professional version will automatically ask you if you want to apply the profile. For those that need the best color reproduction, this is imperative.

Next are the custom pre-sets such as Portrait and Landscape that we outlined above. Those are only part of the Professional version.

The last point is that the Professional version supports 48 bpp TIFF files. The standard version only supports the 24 bpp or 8-bit standard.

Conclusion

The Noiseware Professional standalone client will set you back $49 and the standard version is $26. Both are available for a 15-day free trial.

Noiseware is meant to do one thing, and that's remove noise from your images. It knows its job and it does it well. Well enough to garner it a very loud five out of five.

John Roling is an avid digital photographer, blogger and all-around techno-geek. He can be found online at http://greyhawk68.dominohosting.biz or emailed at jroling@gmail.com.