Today I have a surprise for you, in the form of the best noise removal software available, Imagenomic Noiseware Professional.

I decided to take the plunge recently and buy the standalone program as well as the photoshop plugin, and it’s saved my noisey images many a time.

Hit the jump to find out more…

Above you can see a screenshot from the standalone program. The photoshop plugin is only slightly different, but features a custom noise profiling tool that allows you to select up to 10 areas of the image to define the noise profile for the rest of the image, which can be very useful.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the sections of the screen:

1. Here we have the image preview, once you’ve pressed the Go button on the top left, you can simply click the image switch between the filtered and unfiltered versions of the image if you don’t have a split screen preview on.
2. This is the batch processing section, the most useful part of this program. Simply drag and drop files here, or use the ‘add’ tool to add folders or multiple files.
3. Here we see the noise profile graph. Detailed explanations of this are found in the documentation. One particularly useful feature of the pro version though allows the program to ‘learn’ and develop the best profiles for your camera and editing suite.
4. This is where you select the noise removal levels and the levels of noise in your image. You can also add some sharpening here, which isn’t bad but doing this in photoshop will give you some more control.
5. Up here are all the display options, such as zoom, preview (updates the image when you change a setting) and what taskbars appear on the sides of the image.

And there you have it, pretty simple really

Imagenomic actually has a pretty good tutorial on the noise reduction workflow on their website, which is well worth a look.

You can find it Here.

In short, however, a pretty good way of doing things is to do the noise reduction first before doing any other editing. So, open up an image in Noiseware Pro and a good starting place is to just use the default settings to clear up the image.

If, however, you have a very noisey image, then you might want to use the full suppresion option from the drop down list at the top.

Doing this, you get rid of nearly all the luminance and colour noise while still retaining an acceptable level of detail, especially for web use.

Now, you probably want to do this to all your images from a shoot, so just load up the images in the batch processing section, click on Edit Settings at the bottom of the toolbar and make sure you have current settings selected, and this will use the settings you’ve used to remove noise on your first image.

Then, just select a place to save the photos and let it do it’s job.

I find, in general, a batch of about 100 photos takes somewhere near 10 minutes, which is perfectly reasonable.

Here you can see a 100% crop from an image Before adding noise reduction.

This shot was taken at ISO 6400 on a Canon EOS 1d mk iii, looks pretty grotty if you ask me.

Here’s the 100% crop after doing a full suppresion, quite a lot better in my opinion, especially if it’s going to be used for the web or prints up to A4 in size.

Now, taking that image into photoshop, we get this:

Sure, it’s not perfect and nothing like a shot taken at ISO 100, but it’s certainly better than the original. This kind of thing works very well for the web and prints up to A4 in size.

This is a little comparison of the different noise removal methods built in to the program.

As you can see, default does a pretty good job, leaving an acceptable level of detail while getting rid of the horrible, sparkly-ness that luminance noise creates. However, I prefer to use full suppresion for a noisey image such as this when the intended uses are only small prints and web use.

So there you have it, you’ll hear me raving about this program a lot in the future, so look out!

Filed under: Gear, Reviews, Tutorials by Manticorp