Turn down the noise
Posted by marshall Fri, 16 Sep 2005 18:59:00 GMT
I finally got around to buying a copy of NoiseWare the other day. I've been meaning to get some kind of photograph noise reducing software for a while, and the new phone gave me the final push. As with most consumer digital cameras, the camera in the 6682 doesn't fare too well in low-light conditions, and even has some graininess in well-lit scenes. NoiseWare is amazing at reducing the noise while preserving the detail. It's not perfect -- there's only so much it can do with what you give it -- but it certainly helps.
Click on the picture below to see a before/after comparison:
I really should have bought it earlier; it also works very well on photos I took with my Treo. Combine it with a bit of black/white level adjustment and slight unsharp mask, and some surprising detail can emerge.
NoiseWare's certainly not the only product on the market that does this; I also tried Noise Ninja, and I've heard good things about Neat Image as well. I liked Noise Ninja's method of selecting parts of the image you knew to be noise. But from what I read and from the free trials I used, NoiseWare seemed to provide the best results. I got the Photoshop plug-in version; there's also a standalone one for those without Photoshop. All three of the products mentioned have versions for both Mac OS X and Windows.
