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Useful ISO 400 noise reduction for G-1/2, pro90

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Mike K

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I finally got a chance to try Fred Miranda's noise reduction for the G-1&2 & pro90 IS. Its called g-ISOR and is sold on Fred's site:
http://www.fredmiranda.com/Action_profilesPage/index.html

You need photoshop 5.5 or higher to load and use it. The following example was shot at a junior high class play with rather dim lighting. A G-1 camera, ISO 400, full zoom, f2.5 1/20sec with an Olympus B300 teleconverter. This is a rather small crop blown up to see the effective of noise reduction and any loss of resolution. I don't think i have to identify which is which.



I have one other side by side comparison crop in this album shot at 1/6 sec.
http://www.fototime.com/inv/28A31BDA152413F

The noise reduction action seems quite effective on the longer (noiser) shots when the noise is in smoother textures.
Mike K
 
Thanks for posting these samples. I've also had good luck applying Fred's actions to G1 100-400 exposures.
Mike K said:
I finally got a chance to try Fred Miranda's noise reduction for
the G-1&2 & pro90 IS. Its called g-ISOR and is sold on Fred's site:
http://www.fredmiranda.com/Action_profilesPage/index.html
You need photoshop 5.5 or higher to load and use it. The following
example was shot at a junior high class play with rather dim
lighting. A G-1 camera, ISO 400, full zoom, f2.5 1/20sec with an
Olympus B300 teleconverter. This is a rather small crop blown up to
see the effective of noise reduction and any loss of resolution. I
don't think i have to identify which is which.



I have one other side by side comparison crop in this album shot at
1/6 sec.
http://www.fototime.com/inv/28A31BDA152413F
The noise reduction action seems quite effective on the longer
(noiser) shots when the noise is in smoother textures.
Mike K
Click to expand...
 
How long dose it take to do this action and on what type of computer?

Thanks,
Morris
Mike K said:
I finally got a chance to try Fred Miranda's noise reduction for
the G-1&2 & pro90 IS. Its called g-ISOR and is sold on Fred's site:
http://www.fredmiranda.com/Action_profilesPage/index.html
You need photoshop 5.5 or higher to load and use it. The following
example was shot at a junior high class play with rather dim
lighting. A G-1 camera, ISO 400, full zoom, f2.5 1/20sec with an
Olympus B300 teleconverter. This is a rather small crop blown up to
see the effective of noise reduction and any loss of resolution. I
don't think i have to identify which is which.



I have one other side by side comparison crop in this album shot at
1/6 sec.
http://www.fototime.com/inv/28A31BDA152413F
The noise reduction action seems quite effective on the longer
(noiser) shots when the noise is in smoother textures.
Mike K
Click to expand...
 
Speed depends on the computer, but pretty quick. Mac & PC. See:
http://www.fredmiranda.com/CanonG1_G2_pro90/index.html
morris said:
Thanks,
Morris
Mike K said:
I finally got a chance to try Fred Miranda's noise reduction for
the G-1&2 & pro90 IS. Its called g-ISOR and is sold on Fred's site:
http://www.fredmiranda.com/Action_profilesPage/index.html
You need photoshop 5.5 or higher to load and use it. The following
example was shot at a junior high class play with rather dim
lighting. A G-1 camera, ISO 400, full zoom, f2.5 1/20sec with an
Olympus B300 teleconverter. This is a rather small crop blown up to
see the effective of noise reduction and any loss of resolution. I
don't think i have to identify which is which.



I have one other side by side comparison crop in this album shot at
1/6 sec.
http://www.fototime.com/inv/28A31BDA152413F
The noise reduction action seems quite effective on the longer
(noiser) shots when the noise is in smoother textures.
Mike K
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
I have a 600 mz laptop and it is pretty quick, only a handfull of seconds per image.
Mike K
morris said:
How long dose it take to do this action and on what type of computer?
Click to expand...
 
jka said:
Mike K said:
I finally got a chance to try Fred Miranda's noise reduction for
the G-1&2 & pro90 IS.
Click to expand...
There's also a totally free and quite good action downloadable at
http://netnet.net/~llueck/NR.htm
Click to expand...
I've readon this forum that this one is really slow, perhaps the reason behind Morris' question.
jka said:
A comparison of different noise reduction actions & packages
can be found at http://www.belgiumdigital.com/ under tips&tricks
section.

-janne
Click to expand...
thanks for the references. I picked up a tip or two from the belgium digital site, even though all of these tests on on OLY cameras. Do the high ISO noise reduction before resizing, and that downsampling will reduce this type of high ISO noise.
Mike K
 
Mike K said:
I finally got a chance to try Fred Miranda's noise reduction for
the G-1&2 & pro90 IS.
Click to expand...
Mike:

For comparison, would you be willing to download NeatImage ( http://www.neatimage.com/ ;) and use it to run a comparison on those shots (or e-mail me the photo and I'll try it out for you)? I want to get something for cleaning up noise, but I'm not sure which is better -- Fred's action or Neat Image. Fred's action is optimized for G1/G2/Pro90, whereas NeatImage works on any noisy image (which means I could also use it with my film scanner). However, if Fred's action does a better job on images form my G2, then I'll get it.

Cheers!

Richard Drdul
Vancouver, BC
 
NeatImage is very slow and has a pore interface. I have a P3 1000 with 512MB RAM and could never see making NeatImage part of my workflow when working with a shoot of a few hundred photos. This is why I was asking about the speed of Fred’s actions.

Morris
Richard Drdul said:
Mike K said:
I finally got a chance to try Fred Miranda's noise reduction for
the G-1&2 & pro90 IS.
Click to expand...
Mike:

For comparison, would you be willing to download NeatImage
( http://www.neatimage.com/ ;) and use it to run a comparison on
those shots (or e-mail me the photo and I'll try it out for you)?
I want to get something for cleaning up noise, but I'm not sure
which is better -- Fred's action or Neat Image. Fred's action is
optimized for G1/G2/Pro90, whereas NeatImage works on any noisy
image (which means I could also use it with my film scanner).
However, if Fred's action does a better job on images form my G2,
then I'll get it.

Cheers!

Richard Drdul
Vancouver, BC
Click to expand...
 
Mike K said:
Mike K said:
There's also a totally free and quite good action downloadable at
http://netnet.net/~llueck/NR.htm
Click to expand...
I've readon this forum that this one is really slow, perhaps the
reason behind Morris' question.
Click to expand...
Well, it's a bit on the slow side, but definitely faster than NeatImage(haven't had a chance to test Fred Miranda's action), and based on the comparison on Belgium Digital, it seems to be a tie between E10Nr and Fred's action.

-janne
 
Dear Morris,

Here is the same example as above but with the Neat Image processed version added:



Neat Image is currently slower than some other tools but produces better results. I guess you can easily tell the difference.

Best regards,
Vladimir
 
I downloaded the demo program for neat image and used the default parameters (probably couldn't change them anyway on the demo). I was interested to see how long it took as well. Fred Miranda's filter is a photoshop action and includes several steps, has no variables to adjust or optimize and is fully automated; one click and it is done. On the 2 mb TIFF full image it took 5 sec on my 600 mz laptop. It costs $12. The neat image program first evaluates the image to get some filtering parameters, of which there are many that can be adjusted. Thus this example is undoubtedly not optimized for ones taste (certainly not mine). Running the filter after the 5 sec evaluation, took 50 sec. Thus it is 10x longer than Fred's G-IsoR action. The upside of the Neat Image program is that one doesn't need PS 5.5 or 6 to run actions as it is a stand alone program and costs $30. Thus if I didn't have PS 5.5-6 and had only a few photos to treat it would be useful. Here is the same comparison as Vladimir, again only a small crop of the original ISO 400 image, the order is L to R: original, g-isoR, neat image;



The neat image certainly has less noise, but has kind of dreamy, smoothed out look to it. I'm sure some manipulation of the filtering variables would help.
Mike K
Vladimir said:
Dear Morris,

Here is the same example as above but with the Neat Image processed
version added:
Neat Image is currently slower than some other tools but produces
better results. I guess you can easily tell the difference.

Best regards,
Vladimir
Click to expand...
 
Mike,

You can change all the parameters in the Demo as you like. The Demo is fully functional (except the output: Demo saves only to BMP).
Mike K said:
I downloaded the demo program for neat image and used the default
parameters (probably couldn't change them anyway on the demo). I
was interested to see how long it took as well. Fred Miranda's
filter is a photoshop action and includes several steps, has no
variables to adjust or optimize and is fully automated; one click
and it is done. On the 2 mb TIFF full image it took 5 sec on my
600 mz laptop. It costs $12. The neat image program first
evaluates the image to get some filtering parameters, of which
there are many that can be adjusted.
Click to expand...
That is correct. And you can save these parameters to use them aftewards for similar images. You adapt Neat Image once to yout camera and use it then just like actions.

Also, Max Lyons have written Neat Batch application which adds some basic batch functionality to Neat Image. We am also working to add complete batch processing to Neat Image.

Regards,
Vladimir
 
Vladimir said:
You can change all the parameters in the Demo as you like. The Demo
is fully functional (except the output: Demo saves only to BMP).
Click to expand...
This raises a question I've always wondered about -- what's the difference between a BMP and a 8-bit TIFF? Both files are the same size in MB. Is there any loss of image quality with BMP as compared with TIFF?

Richard Drdul
Vancouver, BC
 
Well, after seeing Vladimir's example of what NeatImage can do, I downloaded the program and took the time to learn how to use it. Amazing! I've tried it on three or four photos, all 2700 dpi scans of ISO 400 negs and slides on a Nikon Coolscan III. I've included an example below of what it can do. Note that in this example, I ran NeatImage on the raw scan -- I have done no colour correction, sharpening or anything else. I also used an "Amount" setting of only 40%, which avoided the overdone "dreamy" look that higher settings produce on this image.



Tomorrow, I will try NeatImage out on a couple of ISO 400 shots with my G2. Assuming I get the same great results, I'm gonna buy it for sure! The only downside is the slow processing speed, but if the developer adds a batch processing feature, then I can go do something else while NeatImage cranks away.

Richard Drdul
Vancouver, BC
 
Richard,

There is no difference between BMP and a 8-bit TIFF (between 24bit RGB BMP and 24bit RGB TIFF to be precise) from the standpoint of image quality. Both are lossless formats. BMP is just simpler from technical point of view. TIFF can contain more supplementary information (so called meta-data, like EXIF data fields and the like).
Richard Drdul said:
Vladimir said:
You can change all the parameters in the Demo as you like. The Demo
is fully functional (except the output: Demo saves only to BMP).
Click to expand...
This raises a question I've always wondered about -- what's the
difference between a BMP and a 8-bit TIFF? Both files are the same
size in MB. Is there any loss of image quality with BMP as
compared with TIFF?

Richard Drdul
Vancouver, BC
Click to expand...
Vladimir
 
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