When the light is poor, even with your aperture wide open you may need to use a high ISO setting (400 or higher) in order to get fast
enough shutter speed to get any sort of picture with the correct exposure. I don't like pictures taken with really high ISO in the main,
unless I have to do little or no cropping. This is because the high ISO setting
causes the picture to appear more grainy which is exaggerated if the
image is cropped and enlarged. However, I have discovered a neat tool for getting rid of this noise. (Thanks to Richard Bedford for the
tip on his web site here).
It's a product called Neat Image. You can buy it relatively cheaply, by download from the internet, at
www.neatimage.com. (No I don't get commission). You can use it as a stand alone product or, if like
me you have Adobe Photoshop, you can use it as a Photoshop plug-in and that's how we'll be reviewing
it here.
The following picture was taken at ISO 400 and as you can see is quite grainy.
With the Neat image Photoshop plug-in installed, I can select 'Filter', then 'Neat Image' and then 'Reduce Noise' as shown below.
The following window will appear.
Start by clicking the 'Auto profile' button. Neat Image will automatically choose the best part of the image to sample. In order
for it to work
it really needs an area that is the same or very similar in colour to sample. So you probably should do the
Neat Image thing before any cropping
as this gives it a better chance of finding a uniform area. Also I find it works better if you use it before tinkering with the exposure. In this
case, after clicking 'Auto Profile', it chose the area marked below and sampled it to see how the picture should be treated for noise reduction.
So now click on the 'Noise Filter Settings' tab to get the following screen.
Don't worry too much at first about the settings. I've found the default values work well in most cases. When you download the product you also get some
on-line documentation that describes how to use these if you need to investigate further or just want to experiment. For now we'll just use the default
settings. Use the 'Preview' button to see how the default settings will affect the image. Zoom in a bit if you need to. Like so...
If you're happy, click the 'Apply' button and hey presto!... It may take a minute or two, especially if the image is large but it's worth the wait.
And here are the before and after images side by side.. Neat, isn't it?
And here is the final image as posted on my site....
