Noise Ninja

Introduction

Noise Ninja is a Photoshop plug-in that can effectively remove noise and grain from digital photographs and scanned images, while preserving important image detail. In addition, Noise Ninja produces cleaner and smoother enlargements from low-ISO images.

Noise Ninja is from PictureCode, a company based in Austin, Texas that specializes in tools for digital photographers. Their Noise Ninja plug-in has won American Photo magazine's Editor's Choice award.

You can learn more about PictureCode and Noise Ninja from their site, and also download a trial version of the plug-in. The trial works exactly in the same way as the full version other than adding a grid to processed images.

We wish to thank Fern from PictureCode, who coordinated this review.

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How To Use

Here's how you can use Noise Ninja to remove noise from an image:

1. Open any image in an image editor such as Adobe Photoshop (assuming you have installed the Noise Ninja plug-in).
2. In Photoshop, choose the Filter | PictureCode | Noise Ninja option. Doing so opens the Noise Ninja interface that you can see in Figure 1, below.
3. 
   Figure 1: Noise Ninja interface
3. The Noise Ninja interface is divided into several logical areas. The left side shows the whole image with a selection over the chosen area, and the results of applying the plug-in to this area are shown in the magnified section on the right side.
4. At the bottom of this preview, there are several tabs that allow you to customize settings. If your camera or scanner model is fairly popular, you can download a profile for the camera or scanner from the PictureCode site. These profiles have been created scientifically by the people at PictureCode so that you can get quick results, and even these profiles can be further fine-tuned as required.
5. We would add that Noise Ninja allows you to create your own custom profiles. Instructions are provided in the users guide and it only takes a few minutes. The folks at PictureCode used the same process to create the existing profiles.
5. Once you are happy with the settings and the preview, just click the OK button to apply the changes.

Here are some Before and After samples:

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Specifications

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