RawTherapee seems to do a good job with noise. Good enough for me, anyway when it's not busy crashing. (;

kanuck said:
I'll second the opinion on noise ninja, however I have found that significant noise in an image has been impossible to fix. For example, over ISO 2500 on a D700 I just won't do it anymore, which is fine for me.

I still use a D70s which has horrible noise, probably worse than anything you'll get from a D700. That said, I have run into cases where Noise Ninja seems to break down, but you have to train Noise Ninja to look at the image differently by selecting your noise zones very carefully. Noise Ninja's auto find noise algorithm can be fooled quite easily. If you choose the targets with scrutiny, it'll perform much better. In some cases I use the removal by color instead of luminance option and it works much better.

I tried Topaz Denoise recently. Not too thrilled with it. Seems content specific. On some images it works well, on others it completely craps out or blurs too much regardless of settings. I met the developer of the software at a tradeshow where he was giving demos, and boy what a cockey jerk. He was bragging how much better denoise was and how it uses an algorithm not based on spectral analysis and wavelets like Ninja and other competitors as if denoise was the undisputed king or something. I wanted to see for myself how the software worked, so I offered an image off my flashcard from a photo shoot the previous evening to test. He did everything possible to avoid demonstrating his software from ducking questions, to changing the subject, to eventually flat out ignoring me. I just wanted to see how his software works, didn't care if it was on the floor or after hours where nobody else would see. But he still flat out refused to demonstrate the software on anything than his canned demos which consisted of two images - a pizza and a coffin from a museum shot. When I asked to see other settings applied to his canned demo images, he still refused to make adjustments. yeah...I'll buy his stuff. I went to competitors in other booths and all of them accommodated me without issue.

I downloaded Lightroom 3.2 yesterday. Support for NEX-5 raw files (finally!). Adamz, I thought you at least might be interested if you didn't know already.

Has anyone used the DxO Optics Pro for this?

I use Nik as a Lightroom plugin and it is awesome and very simple to use. I use the whole Nik suite actually. It works great for my workflow. I used Noise Ninja for a long time and it worked well and is fairly cheap. I haven't tried Lightroom 3 yet. It sounds that it is better but I would like to see the comparisons.

I think Lightroom 3 is leaps and bounds better than Lightroom 2. I bought the Noise Ninja plugin for Lightroom 2, and really liked not only its ability to "profile" your specific noise characteristics, but also the fine-grained control over how you wanted to attack the noise problem.

That said, I haven't compared my LR2+NN workflow's results directly to LR3, as I just started with LR3. Also I have never compared NN to Neat Image or Phase One's offering. I just know it trumped LR2's ass.

I'll second the opinion on noise ninja, however I have found that significant noise in an image has been impossible to fix. For example, over ISO 2500 on a D700 I just won't do it anymore, which is fine for me.

I just tried out the Topaz DoNoise 5 and I was really impressed at first sight. I accidentally shot some concert pictures with my D40x at ISO3200 which makes the word horrible sound like a grave understatement and the result that I got from DeNoise blew me away. Agreed, you will never get a large quality print from it but for online use it is just brilliant.

Or at least try it out. You get 30 days free and you can decide if it does what you want. I downloaded it yesterday and I'm really impressed with the noise reduction, not to mention the automatic lens correction with the database (which I hope expands to include my Tamron 17-50 soon—maybe I'll have time to use their profile generator on it soon).
I've said it before on this forum, but Lightroom lets me avoid photoshop on probably 95% of my work. The lens correction will save a few more percent...anyone want a copy of CS4? Just kidding.

towen7 said:
Lightroom 3 is now shipping and the noise reduction in the develop module is awesome.

I just looked at the noise-reduction demo at Adobe's site. Impressive. I bought Aperture because I bought a Mac, but Lightroom 3 looks quite powerful for "just" an image-management application. Guess I'm switching to Lightroom!

I have had great results with the noise reduction built into Capture One. With Phase One's Expression Media promotion going on the price is fantastic, free if you own Expression Media 2. Or you can buy Expression Media for $49, then use the serial to get Capture One for free.

If you go to the May 25th 2010 archive section of Thom Hogan's website you'll find the $49 offer code to put into Phase One's website. Phase is offering this promotion since they just purchased Expression Media from Microsoft.

I do use Neat Image (the large version). I like it a lot. Maybe give it a shot in trial.

I also came across this one a week back:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/software/topaz.shtml

Thanks guys.

I have been happy with the noise removers in gimp.. "Greystoration" and "Selective Gaussian blur" Will have a look at the new UFRaw ..

If you just need some noise reduction, the new version of UFRaw does a surprisingly good job, and it's free. You might want to give it a try and see if it's good enough, or at least something to use until you find something better.

towen7 said:
Lightroom 3 is now shipping and the noise reduction in the develop module is awesome.

Thanks for the heads up, towen. I just ordered a copy and I'll be starting the trial today while I wait. Thank you Adobe for releasing it while I'm still a student! ($97 shipped at academic superstore with $5 off $50 coupon code 5OFF50)

Not too many softwares will do RAW image noise reduction.

Noise Ninja is a good noise remover and is pretty straightforward to use including batch processing. Available as a standalone application or a plugin to the Adobe products.

Nikon Capture NX has OK noise reduction, but it's a bit slow in processing. I hear they'll be upgrading the noise reduction algorithm in the next release, but who knows when that'll be. Capture NX is written by Nik Software.

Lightroom 3 is now shipping and the noise reduction in the develop module is awesome.

It has versions for both. Depending on your purchase. Check this site out. bibblelabs

Is that for PC or Mac kauyeung?

I need PC.

I use Bibble5. It is a not so expensive software that does a lot of things and it do RAW too.

I attended a webinar of the new Nik software HDR product and saw their noise reduction and sharpening plug-ins for lightroom - very impressive indeed. Following that I have downloaded the trial version of Neat Image but found it doesn't do raw only jpg, tiff and bmp.

What are the best noise reduction products around in the opinion of the members here bearing in mind price. The home version (small batch) of Neat Image is only $29.99 which is excellent value - if only it did raw. No way can I pay more than $100 and it would have to be special ideed to cost that much. I don't mind small batch limitations so long as it works.

Tia,