Imagenomic Noiseware: Quiet Your Images

While cleaning up the images for the previous article Download: Sky, one of the things that bothered me was that my digital SLR camera produced a small amount of noise and grain in the image.  Although the Florida skies are beautiful, the sun is also very bright, which can make it difficult to capture a photograph without pixel artifacts in the image.  I don’t have the money to buy a new camera with better features or lenses to correct the problem, so I began to research the internet attempting to find a cheap quick solution to my debacle.  The answer is a beautiful piece of software, which is a Photoshop plugin called Noiseware, and was developed by the fine folks at Imagenomic.

There are many pros to using Noiseware.  First, it is extremely easy to use Noiseware out of the box and see immediate results.  There are a number of presets that come with the software that handle most types of photographs.  My suggestion is to start with a preset and tweak from there.  Noiseware is also very fast, adjusting the settings reveals immediate results only after minutes.  My favorite feature about Noiseware is that if you click on the screen it shows the before image, when you release it shows the results.  This is a very nice feature when testing settings to see the results or simply to try and understand what each setting is doing.  Even though Noiseware IS very simple to use there is an endless array of dials and sliders to adjust in order to get your desired results.  If there is not a preset that does what you need it to do, go into manual mode and sample yourself.  The only negative to this software is that there are a lot of settings, but do not be intimidated by them. Noiseware does not require learning a new software or interface, as mentioned before it is a plugin for Adobe Photoshop, so if you are familiar with Photoshop using Noiseware will be no problem.

Let’s take a look at what Noiseware can do after only spending 15 minutes with the software. Below is a detail portion of one of the sky images that I created in the previous post. After only 15 minutes it is quite apparent that the noise and grain of the photo before Noiseware has been completely removed after its use. Noiseware is not just great for images without a lot of detail, but the structure of the software is built around detail and control.

The difference between the before and after images are truely remarkable, but how does Noiseware work?  Good question.  At first glance it appears that Noiseware is simply an advanced blur filter, this is partly true, but Noiseware is more advanced than that. Noiseware contains a feature called Detail Guard which is enables a series of sliders that allows noise to be quieted according to tonal and color ranges of the image.  This means that Noiseware understands that the frequency of tone and color generally when great, equates to detail.  Adjust the dials to protect the detailed features in your image.  There is an endless supply of Photoshop plugins that are available, but this is an essential plugin for any serious digital photographer, and the price is unbeatable.

If anyone from Imagenomic is reading you can borrow my catchphrase for your software if you want to sponsor the site ;)  Quiet Your Images with Noiseware.

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