Techie goodness
Feb. 26th, 2005 10:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumI am in love.
I've been using my new camera (a fair bit, since the beginning of January I've shot more than 7,000 frames).
The images are not as clear as I would like. Having just retrieved some film, I am reminded that the lenses I have are all possessed of more resolving power than the CCD, this is the case with all digitals; and someday may well be fixed, but as the means are different, it might not. Daguerrotypes were not able to live up the advances in lenses. It's possible that film will remain the best method, though computing power may correct for this, which brings us back to the issue of my being in love.
My father sent me a program to play with, and review. Damn.
I like it a lot, enough that I am giving it an overwhelmingly favorable review. If, as time goes on, my opinions change I'll issue a correction.
It's a Photoshop plug-in. Which, if I was reading the literature correctly as I was loading the license key, has limited function, even if one doesn't plump for the key.
Noise Ninja ($45 dollars for the home version, $80 for the pro) Picture Code.com is some damned good stuff.
They label it as reducing high ISO noise levels. No. It just plain cleans up images. I think, were I to use it, in conjunction with Grain Surgery Visual Infinity I could fake film images, at sizes up to 8x10.
One of the reasons I haven't bought Grain Surgery yet is my lack of satisfaction with the samples they use to show it's noise reduction. Absent that, adding grain, no matter how well it replicates the films and papers I might want to emulate just wasn't worth the $150.
I've just started to play with it. Out of the box it takes about five minutes to feel safe applying it to an image. And even on the clean images I get at large fine JPG, ISO 200 (which is what I've been shooting, because it's easier to post them to the web, I don't have to convert RAW or TIFF to JPPG to get make them small enough to upload/host [who among you want's to pull down a 10mb file, twice the size of your screen?]) the amount of improvement is noticeable to everyone I've shown them too, not just to me.
Add the tailor made profiles (taken from the analysing the noise patterns of specific cameras, at each ISO stop in their range) and it gets better still.
The part I like best, batch processing. I set up serialized three directories, told it to reduce the noise on every image format in there, and took the dogs for a walk. I then came home and made dinner, did some web-surfing and all the while the program was working in the background. It took about 4 hours, but some 2,300 images, average 3.5mb each were cleaned up.
The only thing I dislike about it (and it doesn't matter much to anyone who isn't shooting pro, and when I get more practice with Photo-shop that may be easily worked around) is that it can't be told to convert a RAW file to TIFF, or sRGB, or JPG, and then clean it up.
Small price to pay.
I've been using my new camera (a fair bit, since the beginning of January I've shot more than 7,000 frames).
The images are not as clear as I would like. Having just retrieved some film, I am reminded that the lenses I have are all possessed of more resolving power than the CCD, this is the case with all digitals; and someday may well be fixed, but as the means are different, it might not. Daguerrotypes were not able to live up the advances in lenses. It's possible that film will remain the best method, though computing power may correct for this, which brings us back to the issue of my being in love.
My father sent me a program to play with, and review. Damn.
I like it a lot, enough that I am giving it an overwhelmingly favorable review. If, as time goes on, my opinions change I'll issue a correction.
It's a Photoshop plug-in. Which, if I was reading the literature correctly as I was loading the license key, has limited function, even if one doesn't plump for the key.
Noise Ninja ($45 dollars for the home version, $80 for the pro) Picture Code.com is some damned good stuff.
They label it as reducing high ISO noise levels. No. It just plain cleans up images. I think, were I to use it, in conjunction with Grain Surgery Visual Infinity I could fake film images, at sizes up to 8x10.
One of the reasons I haven't bought Grain Surgery yet is my lack of satisfaction with the samples they use to show it's noise reduction. Absent that, adding grain, no matter how well it replicates the films and papers I might want to emulate just wasn't worth the $150.
I've just started to play with it. Out of the box it takes about five minutes to feel safe applying it to an image. And even on the clean images I get at large fine JPG, ISO 200 (which is what I've been shooting, because it's easier to post them to the web, I don't have to convert RAW or TIFF to JPPG to get make them small enough to upload/host [who among you want's to pull down a 10mb file, twice the size of your screen?]) the amount of improvement is noticeable to everyone I've shown them too, not just to me.
Add the tailor made profiles (taken from the analysing the noise patterns of specific cameras, at each ISO stop in their range) and it gets better still.
The part I like best, batch processing. I set up serialized three directories, told it to reduce the noise on every image format in there, and took the dogs for a walk. I then came home and made dinner, did some web-surfing and all the while the program was working in the background. It took about 4 hours, but some 2,300 images, average 3.5mb each were cleaned up.
The only thing I dislike about it (and it doesn't matter much to anyone who isn't shooting pro, and when I get more practice with Photo-shop that may be easily worked around) is that it can't be told to convert a RAW file to TIFF, or sRGB, or JPG, and then clean it up.
Small price to pay.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-26 08:50 pm (UTC)I'd imagine you should be able to script an action that does the conversion and then cleanup, no?
no subject
Date: 2005-02-26 09:51 pm (UTC)I need to get more proficiency with Photoshop. Right now I can do gross adjustements, but masking and layer-work is still beyond me.
Time to drag out the manual.
TK
no subject
Date: 2005-02-27 01:58 am (UTC)Ah, I thought you were talking about doing this in Photoshop with the plug-in.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-27 02:02 am (UTC)TK