Noise Ninja or FFT?

[synthetamine]

Greetings all, just started working with film and getting it developed at the camera specialty store. Anyway after expressing my concerns over how I could get my film to a high quality digital format they returned me a CD with the pictures in 1700xsomething at 96dpi. Pretty good, they told me it would be 300dpi but this is adequate. Anyway there is some grain in the originals from the process used to create the image from the negative, what is the best way to remove this noise?

After playing around with noise ninja, the only drawback I have is that on the model's head there is quality loss in the strands of her hair. Some critics have told me that the noise ninja one looks more whimsical and they like it more (than the original). I haven't tried FFT yet but would that be a solution for the kind of noise presented in the original?

original http://i293.photobucket.com/albums/m...e/FH000012.jpg

released
http://synthetamine.deviantart.com/art/000012-90839372

and regarding the watermarks or lack thereof, I'm much more concerned about getting my post-processing process down than I am about watermarking

[secretagents]

You could just brush the original hairs back in, no ?

There is nothing for FFT there I think but you may want to try Neat Image which is, in my opinion, vastly superior to Noise Ninja.

[synthetamine]

brush the hairs back in?

since I only used noise ninja on a duplicate layer, I tried layer masking around the part in question but too much noise (for my taste) was still seen.

Neat Image? I'll look into it..... I get the impression that with these plugins someone will always have a "better" one.

[secretagents]

Yeah, brushing back in, either as you did or with the history brush.

If the original hair has more noise than is acceptable for you, then use another setting with your denoizer that makes you happy with how it treats the hairs and mix the results of several different denoising using the above method.

Neat Image is very configurable. Arguably it is the best denoizer out there, and by quite far in my opinion.

[TommyO]

A couple of points,
(1) FFT works best on pattern noise, noise that repeats itself throughout the entire image. Why? Because it uses mathematical models to find the noise (through Fourier Transforms). If it does not repeat enough, it does not get represented in the resulting equation.
(2) All the plug-ins work well, and yes they are come out with new versions each year to improve. The latest version on Noise Ninja is far better than in the past. If you have it, work with it further and see if you can improve your results. It also has masking capability to prevent it from softening/affecting areas (like the hair). Many of us have more than one plug-in, as one often works better on one image than the other.
(3) There is no substitute for a good mask. Perfect your masking skills and you will enjoy all of the available tools much more. Even the ones bundled with Photoshop !

Good luck !

[plugsnpixels]

Noiseware is a favorite noise-reduction plug-in of many.

[synthetamine]

thanks tommyo, secretagent, I got my hands on Neat Image and it did produce good results. Clearly I need to use masking with filters effects more in this instance to make best use of the software.