I've just been doing some research and playing with noise filtering
software, with spectacular results.
In the luminous-landscape review of the A2, Michael Reichmann says "But
ISO 400 and 800 are both pretty bad, and useful for documentation but
not most esthetic purposes. The use of a good noise reduction program,
like Noise Ninja or Neatimage will help greatly though." That is a
serious understatement. After going over the reviews he links to
somewhere else on his site, it seemed that these 2 were the current best
programs. They both have free download trail versions, NeatImage with
limited function and Noise Ninja with watermarks on output files, but
fully usable to test them.
I tried NeatImage on the still life shots from Steve's Digicams. Without
the camera itself, I couldn't generate a custom profile and the ones for
download only cover iso 64 and 100 at the moment. So I had it generate
an automatic profile from the image. The results on the iso 400 and 800
images is just plain amazing. Noise just vanishes! Are the images as
good as those taken at lower speeds? No. There is a slight, but
certainly noticeable, loss in detail comparing the filtered iso 800
image with the iso 100 one at 100% on the screen, and a less noticable,
but definitely there, loss in detail/sharpness in the filtered iso 400
vs. iso 100. I haven't gone into the program in any depth, but I'm sure
custom profiles could be tuned to vary the balance between sharpness and
noise removal to individual tastes. Both programs have lots of variables
to adjust. A bit of sharpening in PS does help.
I then tried it on the hockey image shot at 1600 iso in the E-1 sample
images from dpreview. Again, there was no camera profile avialable yet
for the new verision 4 of NeatImage. The image must not have lent itself
very well to auto profiling, because the difference between source and
filtered.images was very small. I'm sure it can be made to work well,
but this was just a sampling tour and I moved on. Next I tried Noise
Ninja on the E-1 image. NN has a profile for the E-1. The results were
very good, not as spectacular as for the A2 because the E-1 at 1600 is a
lot less noisy than the A2 at 400, but still very impressive. Noise in
the artifical surfaces of the helmet and in the OOF background was
greatly reduced. It was also very effective on the player's face, but I
would reduce the filtering strength there if going for a large print, as
it removes a bit too much of the fine detail of face, whiskers, etc.
Again it is clear that, with a little experience with the program, it
will dramatically reduce digital noise with minimal impact on any other
image qualities.
Bottom line: 400 and 800 iso become actually usable on the A2. I
haven't tried filtering the lower speeds yet, but it's gotta be good.
Although I haven't tried as many E-1 images, it looks like the noise
issues that worry so many of us aren't insurmountable.
I would like to post samples, but the images are copyright and not
licensed for that use, and I don't want any trouble with such important
info sources. There are samples in the luminous-landscape reviews of
Neatimage
<http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/software/neatimage.shtml> and
Noise Ninja
<http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/software/noise-ninja.shtml>
and on the sites for the programs, NeatImage
<http://www.neatimage.com/index.html> and Noise Ninja
<http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/software/noise-ninja.shtml>
If you have or are considering buying a digital camera, you really
should check these out. They open new horizons, and are cheap, too.
Moose
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