Review: Grain Surgery

[Doug Nelson]

Send me candidate images, and I'll think about it. Grainy pix that are otherwise fine sound interesting (though I'd prefer people to comets).

As always, getting permission from the subjects is the hard part.

[DJ Dubovsky]

RickM,
I don't do much grain removal in Galactic images but I can definately see a use in terrestrial ones. So I may not even need the extras supplied with Grain Surgery. I haven't tried installing them yet. It does seem a little involved but I haven't opened the instructions yet either. What's the learning curve like? I think some of these softwares were written with geeks in mind. I'm no where near Geek status. I'm more like Gawk status.

LQQKER,
It's always nice to get second opinions on things so that really helped. I think you may have a great idea in that grain removal challenge idea. We will probably get entrants using all kinds of standard and plugin and combination methods that might prove to be interesting in comparitive results.
DJ

[RickM]

DJ,

I don't think the learning curve is large - though saving a couple hundred bucks was somewhat of a motivating factor in my case .

My recommendation is to use the 1.09.58 version - I think the interface is a bit simpler.

To install, there are a couple of extra files you need to download from the site in addition to SGBNR (libtiff_3_5_7.dll and vcl50.bpl), and you need to extract these from their archive format per instructions and copy them into the appropriate directories - SGBNR itself, you can then just double click on the icon for it in the directory you have it in, or you can make a shortcut on your desktop. Should take all of a few minutes or so to get it running. If you run into any issues, I'll be happy to help.

As far as adjustments, so far I've only found two that I ever need to mess with - one is the "radius" and the other is the "uniform mask". The default values work ok, and that is what I'd start with, but sometimes lowering the radius or the uniform mask setting will achieve a better result if you're just trying to do a slight amount of reduction. You can easily see the effects of the setting in the preview window - when you press the "preview" button, it calculates and displays the effect for the portion of the window being displayed. If you click on the preview display or click left and drag to move around the display it reverts back to the original.

I've been applying SGBNR to various images, including daylight people shots - it gives good results on these as well (I'm not all that into star shots either).

I don't really find SGBNR very difficult to use (then again, I *am* a geek - I'm in the computer business).

[DJ Dubovsky]

Yahoo!!! I did it!! Lord only knows how but I did it.

OK Rick,
I have just moved up a notch from Gawk status. It's installed and working great. I actually had no problem dealing with it right away. Did wonder why I wasn't seeing any results at first in the preview window until I realized I had to hit the preview button each time I made an adjustment. I'm spoiled by instant previews I guess. Anyway, I'm thrilled and I feel pretty darn good having done the installation myself. All I did was extract the 2 extra files and copy them over to Window System 32 then set up an SGBNR folder to house the file and then clicked on it and opened a file to play around with. I even copied it to my desktop for easy access. Not bad for a rooky huh?
Need to look for a real good example of noise to see how it works. So far I like what I see and you were right, it is easy enough to use. Thanks again for your help.
DJ