NeatImage help

[BWI Scott]

Hi,
I've had some pretty good success with the NeatImage program before but I'm having some trouble now.After I remove the grain from my photos they get a digital/compressed kinda look to them.I'm using the default settings and it was working fine before.See the photo below,the sky looks worse then it did before I used NeatImage.I also noticed that my thumbnail images in my windows explorer looks very bad.I'm not sure if it's something wrong with my settings or maybe it's been that way and I just havent noticed before?Does the sky in this photo look very compressed to anyone else, or is it just my PC?

Thanks
Scott

[Eagle_Driver]

Re: NeatImage help

Does the sky in this photo look very compressed to anyone else, or is it just my PC?

Don't know about anyone else, but on my screen it looks pretty good. If at all, I only see a little faint compression

[Longreach747]

nice photo, looks good on my screen.

ugly plane though

[Freightdogg]

Scott,

There does seem to be some compression in the sky, this is often a result of using Neat-Image. Why were you using it in the first place? Did the sky have objectionable grain? Or the entire photo? If the sky in the original isn't objectionable you can use photoshop to merge the best features of the before and after versions from Neat-Image. Bring up the filtered version in photoshop and copy it to the clipboard. Then bring up the original and paste the filtered version over the original version. Now use the eraser tool (carefully) to erase out the unwanted portions of the filtered version which will expose the original version below it. Finally use the "Flatten Image" command to fix the combined version and then save the combined version with a new file name.

It would be interesting to see the original version here before the Neat-Image filtering to see how far the compression went during the filtering process.

[BWI Scott]

Thanks for the replies guys.

Freightdogg, it's the sky that seemed to have the most grain in the original photo.I still can't figure out why the NeatImage is causing so much compression,it worked quite well for me before.But after doing some investigating it seems the grain in the original photo looks 10 times worse when it's opened in Photoshop.When I open the photo in my normal explorer the grain is much less.So now the questions are,

1) Why is NeatImage causing so much compression?

2) Why does Photoshop show so much grain?

For reference,here is the original photo before NeatImage was used.

[Longreach747]

the 1st image is alot cleaner than the 2nd.

[BWI Scott]

Ok, I figured out the problem.

Seems one of the kids changed my color settings from 32 bit to 16 bit.
I put it back to 32 bit and the NeatImage photos look fine now.

Thanks for the input.
Scott

[Freightdogg]

Scott,

If you use your computer to play DVD's you should keep in mind that most DVD viewing software will automatically drop the graphics resolution to 16 bit. Before I got in the habit of re-setting to 32 bit after playing a DVD I got caught a few times wondering what had gone wrong with my camera.

[Greg]

A little but was the pic taken this past weekend at BWI?

I'm still kicking myself for not being able to get up there this past weekend.

[BWI Scott]

Thanks for the tip Freightdogg.

And you are right Greg,that pic was taken on Saturday at the Dorsey Rd. observation area.I'll have a few more up on JP.net soon, provided they get accepted of course.Looks like another nice weather forecast for next weekend so I'll probably be there then.

Scott

[Greg]

I'll probably be up there also. I had a Band tournament on Sunday and a practice on Saturday so I couldn't make it up. If you're there I'll be the guy with the LA Dodgers hat and the Digital rebel.

[Bruce]

You may or may not already know this but if you have NeatImage just go to their website and download the "profiles" for the D30 (for those of you who still use a D30; may also work for D60/10D) and you install it, and it has a profile for ISO 100, 200, etc just choose the profile and it sets the optimal noise reduction amounts etc. Works fine!

bruce