After trying out Noiseware, Neat Image and Noise Ninja plugins I decided to purchase Noiseware Pro.
I would like to know when is the best time to get rid of the noise. On the images I work on I will be doing alot of cloning to remove various elements in the image.
Do you think its best to get rid of the noise first or get rid of the noise after I have finished compositing and doing my cloning?

Thanks Scott

A good question. Personally I do that as the last step. I have found also that after reducing the noise that sharpening the image often will improve the image. I'm curious as to what others think.

Interesting...everything I have read is to eliminate the noise as the first step.

I've also read to use noise reduction at the beginning rather than face possible distortions in color etc. caused by the noise. I find it easier to see what my real problems are (with a truly noisy image) once I have reduced it.

Deopends on the image but in most cases I use Noiseware at the beginning of the process. If you smooth the noise out first you will get better results when applying curves and levels adjustment because you do not amplify the noise or increase contrast in it which will be more difficult to eliminate later. Many other adjustments and selections are easier when the noise is removed or reduced.
Regards, Murray

I recently came across this site which provides more information about the elimination of noise when using noise ninja..some of the ideas may be of help.

http://www.picturecode.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=4&sid=f5071afc955fa3a12a8e6fe0b87d0c63

my working method is:

- retouch picture(d&b, sharpening, curve etc)
- Noise reduction
- correcting errors after noiese reduction...som areas in the pictures can be abit off in colour so therefor I tend to go iver it a couple of times to see if there some correcting to be done....



Gerry

My method:
1. Compositing
2. Cleaning/Cloning/copying -
3. Noise reduction - I disable all the adjustment layers, except for the cleaned image before running the copy for NeatImage.
4. Sharpening - I merged the layers, except the adjustments layers. Apply sharpening on the merged image.
5. Enable the adjustment layers.

When I need to use liquify, I'll start by doing that.

Next step is cloning and using the healing brush to retouch.
After that I reduce the noise by using a Kodak filter (digital airbrush proffesional)
To get the glamour look I take several steps to reduce the noise, using highpass, blur and vivid light :thumbsup:


Exscuse my english.. I'm dutch :clown:

scott,

welcome to RetouchPRO.

i dont know that i can put when down to a rote process. every image is different. but then i mostly do restorations rather than retouching. and in restorations, you often need all the detail you can get. noise removers tend to blur. so, i normally dont do noise removal till i've found all the detail i think i can get out of the original image.

in retouching, you normally have a better image to work with at the start and you arrive at the de-noising step a lot sooner, just because the detail is already there and you want to clean things up a bit before the retouch. so, i would thnk earlier on, though not necessarily as the first step. if you have to do color correction and re-alignments and any manipulations, i would think you'd still want original data in there for those.

so, i guess what i'm saying is, in retouching, you want to make sure you have all the original data of the image for those processes that need it and then de-noise. de-noising is semi-destructive, so it's rarely my first step, regardless of retouch or restore. so, do all the things first that need the original image data and then de-noise.

but there's always exceptions :)