I took this photo last night with my Nikon Coolpix 5700. Semi-low light, 200 ISO, 1/10th of a second at f/3.3. Because I had the camera on continuous shooting I couldn't use the in camera noise reduction.
This is a crop directly from the original file. This is the area of his face just under and to the right of the headphone.
This is a crop from the same area after running the photo through NeatImage.
The original is overrun with purple and yellow noise, the NI version makes him look jaundiced. Does anyone have any tips for setting up NI so the results are better than this?
First, what working color space are you in? It should NOT be in RGB. Make sure you're in YCrCb jpeg (for color photographs). Make your rough noise analysis from an area with no detail and afterwards I would click on auto fine tune. But most importantly, when you go to the settings tab, I would try reducing (moving all the way to the left) the sliders of the Cr and Cb channels in NOISE REDUCTION AMOUNTS. This way, you will only be reducing noise in only the luminance channel and not the color channels, where it seems your problem lies. If that doesn't work, I would try moving CrCb channels in the other direction to the right. So play around until you get the results you want. I hope this helps...post some results to show.
How about profiles? Did you download the profile for your camera and iso settings?
I couldn't get good results from NI for some time. Then it dawned on me to read the how to on the NI site. What a difference!
I've downloaded the 5700 profiles and tried Olyuzi's suggestions, as well as trying some of the preset filters and I still get really yellowy blotches- the only way I get them to go away is if I use the profile for 800 ISO, but then any filtering renders the details almost non existent! I'll keep trying, and I'll read the "how to" at NI's site more closely. Thanks both for your suggestions.
You may also want to consider another noise reduction application called Noise Ninja. You can find information on it here It provides a nice method of creating your own custom noise profiles for different ISO's and I found it to be better and easier to use than Neat Image. I think Neat Image is very good too. It just depends on what you like best.
Try creating a duplicate layer in PS, and applying gaussian blur, enough to get it fuzzy, but not totally blurry (start with rad = 3-7) then change the blend mode of that layer to color. That won't remove the noise, but it makes the color less obvious.
I think some of the NR programs make stuff look too plasticky, but I have been satisfied enough with my results using the above approach to not worry too much about it.
