keith_cooper Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Looking at Nik Dfine 2 for selective noise reduction | |
I've finally finished reviews of all the current Nik plugins with a look at Dfine, for selective noise reduction in images.
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/reviews/plugins/dfine_2.html
I actually find it of most use for B&W shots where there is quite a lot of noise in one channel in some areas of an image.
If I've a landscape that has some solid blue sky and clouds, and decide to make the blue part darker, as part of my B&W conversion, with the equivalent of an orange filter, then the blue sky part is going to come largely from the red channel in my colour image.
Given that in a deep blue sky, there is relatively little red light, this channel will be at a low level and much more prone to showing noise and banding/posterisation in any subsequent sharpening or processing.
Selectively applying noise reduction to the blue parts of the sky has saved a couple of B&W prints, where I wasn't happy with the amount of noise visible in a large print. Whilst you can do such smoothing on a per channel basis, I find that using Dfine and control points gives a very selective reduction, which shows up in big B&W prints.
Hope the reviews's of interest!
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