Digital BW, The Print

Hi Paul,

I certainly don't intend to start a "product war", but my experience with nik products is that, for the most part, they are genearlly overpriced and limited in use. For example, noise is better handled by products like NeatImage or Noise Ninja, IMHO. Much better control and cheaper to boot! Compare nik Sharpener Pro to something like FocalBlade for sharpening...again, IMO, no contest!

Alan Huntley

> 
> From: "Paul Roark" <paul.roark@...>
> Date: 2004/01/05 Mon AM 10:54:39 EST
> To: "DigitalB&WPrint" <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
> Subject: [Digital BW] Dfine grain & noise reduction
> 
> I may not know how to use the Dfine program, but my initial conclusion is
> that it is about like careful use of Photoshop blur tools.  When the grain
> is effectively reduced, the details are badly blurred.  So, my initial
> conclusion is that for film scans it is not close to being as effect a tool
> as the Nikon GEM feature and is not worth buying.

Neat Image, Noise Ninja, and Grain Surgery actually use sophisticated 
wavelet math to analyze the grain and to eliminate it in a totally 
user defined way.  In general, the other noise/grain reduction 
programs rely on some kind of blurring. IMO,there is no comparison.

For a side-by-side review of grain/noise reduction software see:

www.michaelalmond.com/Articles/noise.htm

I don't agree with Michael's conclusions that Noise Ninja is the 
best, but he hasn't yet reviewed Neat Image 3.1 that is now much 
faster and still is my choice.

Jeff Randall


--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, 
<Alan.Huntley@c...> wrote:
> Hi Paul,
> 
> I certainly don't intend to start a "product war", but my 
experience with nik products is that, for the most part, they are 
genearlly overpriced and limited in use. For example, noise is better 
handled by products like NeatImage or Noise Ninja, IMHO. Much better 
control and cheaper to boot! Compare nik Sharpener Pro to something 
like FocalBlade for sharpening...again, IMO, no contest!