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!

Easter Open Football Tournament, Boxmeer, Holland.

A time of joy was had by all in the sunny flats of Holland this weekend, with the sun rolling over the hills and the grass bright green we were ready to take some serious photos.

Hit the jump for some more, and take a look at the Flickr Set with some highlights in…

We left England at 6AM and got to our hotel in Boxmeer at about 5PM. A very long journey, including a 4 hour trip on a Lithuanian ferry to Antwerp. There wasn’t even a gift shop on board.

Mind you, at least the town we were in was nice. I didn’t really believe people when they said Holland was very flat. They were being very literal, the horizon is dead level everywhere you go.

Here’s a little view of my hotel room:

We had a good first night, just got a bite to eat and went to the bar really, it was nice as there were 2 other franchisees there to chat with, as well as their employed photographers, which made for interesting company.

So, Saturday rolled round quick, up at the crack of dawn to go and set up for the start of the footie tournament.

Despite not speaking a word of Dutch, we got on quite well with the locals and there were nearly no problems selling photos to customers. Most people spoke pretty good English, and those who didn’t it was just a matter of pointing and grunting at the sample pictures.

We in particular were photographing the Under 9’s, Under 16’s, Under 15 Girls, Under 10’s and Under 11’s. This proved to be an interesting mix, and where usually our customer base is the younger kid’s parents, this time it was the older one’s who were buying.

Maybe it’s a Dutch thing.

Just above you can see the winning Under 15’s girls team. They won a pretty massive trophy, as you can see. Biggest I’ve seen for a kid’s tournament at least, and they had one for every age group.

Now, the weekend wasn’t all good. More precisely, my hangover on the Sunday morning wasn’t good. We spent a little too much time in the hotel bar and ended up going to bed at about 2AM, having to get up just 4 hours later to go back to the tournament.

I couldn’t even keep breakfast down that day. What made it worse was having to go straight back to England at the end of the day, a 3 hour drive, 2 hour wait at the port and 4 hours on the ferry.

Not the nicest thing when you’re hungover.

It may not be obvious by the way, but that guy was heading a ball.

So it was a good weekend, we all made good money and had a great time. Especially on the Saturday night.

Here’s one last pic to see you off, but you can see the rest at the Flickr Gallery

Greetings all! Been a while since my last post, I know, but I’ve got an update for you at last!

Today, it’s a Dance Fusion show at Rochester Grammar School for Girls, featuring acts by many local schools including Cheerleading, Breakdancing, Streetdance, Ballet, Irish etc etc.

Hit the jump for some more…

So we got there at about 4 o’clock to shoot the dress rehearsal and give ourselves time to set up, even though the show wasn’t actually starting until about 6.30pm. There show was very varied and contained many styles of music, with one girl doing what I can only assume was an irish jig.

However, as is the case with many of these things, the lighting was very dim. I was using ISO 6400 most of the time at aperture f2.8, which means lots of very noisy, and some out of focus images. Oh well, there wasn’t much we could do as we couldn’t really use flash as this would distract the children who were performing, especially as we took over 400 shots over the course of the evening.

The show had people of all ages in it, boys and girls, from age 11 to 18. Some of the older ones had some very inspiring acts, including one with 3 girls and 3 chairs. A very relaxed but moving performance, I thought.

The lighting technicians had a fog machine going, and at first I thought ‘oh no…this is gonna screw things up, washing out all my images’ however they kindly kept it very subtle once they realised we were there, and it actually provided some fantastic lighting effects:

As you can see, by this beautifully lit picture. Being quite a small stage we were able to get some real nice closeup shots and also some nice wide ones, it was just a shame it was so dark as a lot of the fast moving action was blurred.

As you can probably tell from the image above, this was about as good as it got. Look at the movement in the hair! This was a real opportunity to practice panning with movement, although it’s very hard doing it with people as all their limbs seem to move in opposite directions.

At the end of the show, unfortunately all the parents decided to rush out at once, creating massive crowds around the pictures, meaning we didn’t really sell too many that night, however, I think we will be getting a lot of web sales from this event.

When I got home, I ran some of my selected images through my new piece of software, Imagenomic Noiseware Professional. Now, I’ve used Noiseware before, but only the community edition, and I love it. But recently, I decided to take the plunge and get the full version, mostly because of it’s batch processing ability.

And I have to say. I love it. I absolutely Love It.

Pictures taken at ISO 6400 look like they could have been taken at ISO 100, especially when printed out. Using Full Suppression you can get rid of all noise while still keeping most of the detail. It’s magic, I swear.

I’ll be posting a detailed review of the software once I have a few more examples to show, so watch this space for something good!

Here’s one last image to see you off:

Just a word of warning to you all, in the near future I will be posting a tutorial on restoring and coloring old photos, like the one you see above.

A client came in with a tiny little worn out negative of his parents that he wanted restoring, coloring and enlarged, so of course I was more than happy to oblige. I figure I may just pass on the skills and techniques down to you.

Keep your eyes and ears open!

Rugby today, at Cranbrook Rugby Club. It was a Mini B’s tournament, meaning all the B teams get together and have a tournament, as they’re not able to play in the league games. This is good for us as it means these kids don’t get photographed often.

Hit the jump for some more…

It was very muddy today, and I think the kids had some great fun playing around on the completely waterlogged pitches. You can see how muddy they got in some of the photos. However, getting muddy during the games didn’t stop some of them from getting muddy afterwards by simply rolling around in the mud and puddles. It was great seeing them have so much fun, but pretty disgusting at the same time.

As per this post I decided to concentrate on really getting some quality images today. And hell, it worked. We sold loads of photos, even though we didn’t manage to get every team, let alone every kid.

There’s a balance to be had there. You don’t really want to miss anyone out, in the interest of fairness. Who knows, the people we missed may have come and bought 100 copies of their children’s photos if we’d got them. But then again, you don’t want to be taking rubbish shots. There’s a fine line between quantity and quality and we’re constantly sitting on the edge of it.

Still, today was a complete success. We sold lots of photos on the day, and the people were more than happy with the results. The weather’s starting to get a bit better now, here in England. Summer is just round the corner, and I personally can’t wait. It’s going to be great.

Here’s one last shot to see you off:

So we’re back at Kent College Junior School today for a Netball and Football tournament.

This was a pretty small one for us, there were about 8 netball teams in the morning, and about 6 football teams playing in the afternoon. Usually, a good football tournament might have 100 or so teams playing. We definitely weren’t expecting much, but we were quite wrong.

Hit the jump for some more…

Being so small, it was quite short as well, which was nice. Seeing as the weather was starting to take a turn for the worst, we were happy to make it out of the as soon as possible really. So, Graham and I hit the Netball pretty hard pretty fast, getting shots of all the teams playing within the first 45 minutes. Luckily, we also managed to get most of the team shots, which they really love in Netball, making up most of our sales from netball.

So then after about 2-3hours, once they’d done all their finals, we got a rush of parents up to buy photos, and then we moved on over to the football, about 100 yards down the road.

The football, we thought, might not even be worth covering. There were 36 kids in total, so each one, on average, would have to spend quite a bit to make it worthwhile for us. So we came up with a slightly different plan. We had to get some real quality shots, and not take as many. This meant anyone who came over to look at the photos would surely want to buy one. And boy did they.

We made twice as much from the football as we did from the netball. What was that all about!

The parents were loving it, because there were so few children, we were really able to devote our time to them, covering requests, getting good ones of the goalkeepers, catching referees…All things we usually wouldn’t have time to do in a big tournament.

And the best part of it was: it was starting to feel less like work, and more why I got into this job in the first place. It was about the photography.

So I got thinking, why shouldn’t it be like this every time? If we’re still making money, and still getting shots of everyone, then why can’t we make it about the photography every time? I decided I was going to bear this in mind in future, so watch out in future posts for some fantastic sports an action photography to come

Anyway, I’ll stop rambling on, and leave you with one last shot for the day:

Another Charity ball today, seems like a popular time of year for them. This time it was at the Hilton Hotel in Maidstone.

The charity was organised by a lovely lady, how looked after us very well on the night, however, I couldn’t tell you what it stands for…Gynacologist…something or other. NOT Great Ormand Street Hospital.

The man you see at the top of the post is a bass player (his wife’s a doctor of some sort) who plays all over the world. Most recently with a band called ‘The Mad Pimps’ in spain.

Hit the jump for some more shots…

So we were using some different lights today. Some beautiful Bowens Esprits.

Unfortunately we only had two heads, which wasn’t ideal for a cloth background, especially as we were a bit limited for space.

What was funny were the hotel staff…

Now, bless their hearts, I know it’s their responsibility to make the place look nice…but…they took it to the extremes.

Not only did we have to be very orderly and neat (read: line up our tables exactly and straighten our table cloths exactly) but we even had to obscure all our wires with table skirting(!).

Still, all that got sorted by the staff and we went on with the night.

We had a lot of people come over, and a very nice man offered to buy us some drinks…not before introducing me to his daughter, mind.

The we had the lights set up quite heavy camera right. This was only because of space limitations, though, so don’t go following my example. We had a shoot through umbrella lighting the background and a softbox at the front.

If we’d had more space, we would have placed the shoot through to the left of the studio space.

We still managed to get some fairly good shots out of it though, and made lots of sales, so we were happy.

The night was a success, and after deciding people were getting a little too drunk around us, we took off at midnight.

Here’s one last shot to see you off:

Another tutorial for you today, this time it’s a quick and dirty method for blemish removal that can be done in a matter of minutes and ensures clear, healthy looking skin.

This tutorial uses Adobe Photoshop CS3, and requires the use of layers and layer masks.

Hit the jump for the rest:

Now, there are 7 main steps plus an 8th step if you’re going to use this technique quite often, making it into an easy to use action in PS.

Step 1:

The first step is to load your image into Photoshop, quite easy:

Step 2:

The next step is to create a duplicate layer of the image by either right clicking on the layer and going to ‘duplicate layer’ to make a copy of the image above your original, or by going to Layers>Duplicate Layer:

Step 3:

Now, you want to apply a median filter to the top layer, this is done by going to Filters>Noise>Median:

Now use a setting of roughly 10px, maybe more maybe less depending on the size of your image, I find 10 works roughly well for most images.

The important thing is that you want it to blur out the blemishes and anything else you want to remove from your image. This also works with light wrinkles and funny colouration such as small bruises, stains, crumbs etc.

Step 4:

Now, we don’t want our skin to look too smooth, there’s no skin out there that doesn’t have pores etc.

So, we’re going to apply some noise to our median layer by going to Filter>Noise>Add Noise:

and you want to use Gaussian distribution and tick the box that says Monochromatic. A setting of about 1.3% usually works quite well. You want just enough to be able to see the noise, looking like pores, but not too much so it doesn’t just look grainy:

Step 5:

Now, you need to apply a mask to your image. At the bottom of the layers panel you’ll find this button:

Click it. Your median layer now has a mask. Now press Ctrl + I to invert the mask, making sure the mask is selected. This turns the mask black, letting the bottom layer show through:

Step 6:

Again, making sure that the mask is selected, you now need a to select the brush tool:

and select a brush size suitable for your picture, and a low hardness value:

Press D and then X to set your brush to a white value, then proceed to paint over the areas in the mask that correspond to areas of skin that need clearing.

Step 7:

Now, you should end up with something like this:

As you can see, I’ve only done the boy’s face, but you could just as easily do the girl’s as well. Merge your layers, get on with any other corrections, save your image and presto! You have a portrait with nice clean skin in under 2 minutes.

Before:

and After:

As a bonus, you can record all of this in an action, I have mine set up to F5 so that when I’m editing, it literally takes a few moments to do an entire image:

Bonus Step 8:

I hope you enjoyed the tutorial! Please link to this page on forums etc if you like it, and leave a comment if you used this method.

Back at the Kent College Junior school today for a musical perfomance. I have to say, despite these kids being very young, the standards were very high. There were some very good performances, and some nice shots to be had.

There were all sorts of instruments; violins, cellos, recorders, fluts, timpanis, pianos, clarinets, trumpets, drums, violas, even a choir! A lot of mixed talent at this school, that’s for sure!

One of the major problems though was the fact that everyone had a music stand popping up right in front of their faces.

So I ended up darting around, just trying to be able to see everyone’s faces at some point, which ended up annoying the conductors who kindly asked me if I wouldn’t mind sticking to the sides. Argh!

I felt like I was back at school in year 6 getting a telling off!

Still, the evening was a success, and people were very happy with the photos. We’ll be back there on Saturday to do the football and netball tournaments, so no doubt we’ll be seeing the same kids and parents again. Here’s one more shot to see you off:

Today, we’re at Kent University for a huge cross country event. over 2,000 kids, with roughly 250 running in 8 different races, it was going to be a challenge. If you can imagine trying to thread about 100 needles at the same time, that’s what it was like. It was quite a task.

So, how would we do this? Well, for one, it was a lot of hard work. However, Jeremy was with us today with his new camera. The 1D mk 4 ! And what a camera it was!

Fast focussing, super fast frames per second, what more could you want from a camera?

So, even though there were over 2,000 kids, we still managed to get it all done.

The biggest problem was that they were quite short races. The first set were under 1,000m, which meant that the kids were still very bunched up, even by the time they reached the finish line.

So suddenly, there would be 100 kids run past you within the space of about 10 seconds. How do you do it? Even working at 8 fps on the mark 3, that’s a maximum of 80 kids we could get!

Somehow though, we managed to do it! Just through perserverence and concentration, as well as running forwards and backwards with the camera still firmly held up to my eye.

Here’s another pic to see you off: