And Neither Topaz’s Denoise 5, nor Macphun’s Noiseless offer any kind of image profiling, with both requiring you to simply select a preset on your own and go from there.

While Nik Collection’s Dfine 2 also does its own image analysis, it doesn’t offer the customizability that Neat Image does. One of my favorite things about Neat Image is the software’s auto profiling ability, customizing the noise reduction to each image as needed. These settings put Neat Image among the most customizable noise reduction applications I’ve used.įor me, noise reduction has always been a love-hate relationship, always battling with a balance between preserving detail and reducing unsightly noise. You can also create your own presets for future use. In addition to the sliders, Neat Image comes with some presets, such as Recover Fine Details, Apply Less Noise Reduction, Apply More Noise Reduction, Reduce Noise and Sharpen, and more. You’ll have the ability to adjust quality, the noise reduction amount, recover detail, smooth edges, sharpen, and fine tune the filter itself. You can tweak the settings using the sliders at the right side of the app window. Neat Image will then apply the noise filter settings based on the analysis as done above. You’ll also have the ability to change the preview to various other options, including the RGB preview, a Luminance and Chrominance preview, as well as individual channels. At the bottom left is a zoom toggle to zoom in or out of the image as desired. The preview will switch to the full-color image in the center and the R, G, and B channels will disappear. Now that you’ve analyzed the noise levels in the image, you’ll want to click on the Noise Filter Settings Tab.

These sliders allow you to tweak the noise reduction to your liking after Neat Image has applied the noise profile to the image. While Neat Image 8 is available as a standalone app or a Photoshop and Lightroom plugin, I will be focusing on the plugin version, as that suits my workflow better. When I saw that Neat Image had recently been updated to version 8, I was excited to give it a try and see how it stacked up against the others. Over the years, I found myself gravitating to other noise reduction plugins and applications, such as Nik DFine, Topaz DeNoise, and more recently, Macphun’s Noiseless. Neat Image was no exception in this regard, so I used it sparingly.

While it did a nice job, at that time, all noise reduction software was problematic in that it tended to give images an overly smooth, almost plastic or painted look that did a lot of damage in the fine details of an image. Neat Image was one of the first noise reduction applications I used at that time. In those early days (the early 2000s), when ISO 800 was typically the upper usable limit of high ISO, noise reduction software became a must-have for those of us who were post-processing our files and wanted them to look less like sandpaper and more like something we’d be willing to display. DSLRs routinely top out at high ISO ratings that film shooters and early DSLR users could only dream of. In the early days of digital cameras, noise was a much bigger problem than it is these days.

Review neat image