Plugins for Photoshop, Elements, Lightroom, PSP & others
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NoiseControl effectively removes image noise while preserving essential details and the photographic quality of the image. It offers sharpening, saturation and grain features for enhancing the image after denoising. You can also apply denoising with extreme settings to create painting-like effects. NoiseControl is available as a Photoshop-compatible plugin for Windows and MacOS X. A Windows Standalone/Lightroom version is under development. The NoiseControl plugin works in dozens of graphics applications, including Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, Photo-Paint, PhotoImpact and IrfanView. It supports batch processing, smart filtering and processes grayscale and RGB images with 8-bit and 16-bit/channel.
NoiseControl distinguishes details from noise by performing thousands of clever calculations per pixel. Thus it is able to achieve a superior detail/noise ratio by keeping essential details while filtering noise. For best results it internally operates with 16-bit and 32-bit precision, even when processing 8-bit images.
NoiseControl offers two methods for automatically choosing effective denoising parameters: The Auto Sample feature finds and evaluates a noise sample, a uniform image area without any details, whereas the Auto Preset feature chooses an existing preset according to the embedded EXIF data, mainly the camera model and ISO value, of the photo.
The best results are usually achieved if you selectively adjust the denoising for various image areas. For that purpose NoiseControl allows you to alter the denoising parameters in shadows, midtones, highlights and nine color areas of the image. These selective adjustments can be performed with the help of sliders or by clicking on the appropriate image area with the eyedropper tool and dragging left or right.
On the other hand NoiseControl contains several innovative features. It does not only support multi-core CPUs, but also detects your CPU's L2/L3 cache and adjusts its memory usage accordingly, which results in faster rendering. For faster preview updates you can use the preview limit tool to restrict the effect to a smaller preview region.
Some tools need several seconds to update the preview, because they need to render the whole image, or only update a small part of the preview. NoiseControl updates the preview very quickly and still displays the effect fairly accurately at zoom levels other than 100%. NoiseControl offers an easy to use UI and does not confuse the user with cryptic options. It does not require a complex sequence of denoising steps but displays the result instantly. Some denoising software manufacturers advocate a plastic look and falsely encourage users to shoot with higher ISO values. We do not want people to exchange one evil with another. We believe that it is better to turn obtrusive noise into very fine grain, thus preserving a higher photographic quality. This philosophy is reflected by the moderate default values and the "Control" part of the NoiseControl name. Nevertheless NoiseControl also allows you to produce a soft look if that is what you want.
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