NeatImage 4.2 review

Noise is the main problem facing every digital photographer.

Whether it's produced by shooting in low light conditions, by a poor-quality image sensor in your camera or by over-enthusiastic Jpeg compression, noise is the one feature that can render an image unusable. Photoshop has a built-in noise reduction filter, but it's slow and clumsy, and tends to over-soften images. Luckily, then, NeatImage redresses the balance. This plug-in is simple, quick and easy to use, and did an effective job of removing noise from just about every image we threw at it.

NeatImage works by analysing a picture, first looking for a clear space on which to perform its calibration - an area of blank wall or sky, for instance. It needs a 128 x 128 pixel space for optimum results, although it can work with smaller clear areas if necessary (but with poorer results).

Once NeatImage has found a suitable area to calibrate, it then removes precisely that sort of noise from the rest of the image. And this is where its ingenuity lies: the filter will remove only the noise, leaving all fine detail and colouring intact. In practice, the results are stupendous. There are few digital captures that don't benefit greatly from a pass through NeatImage, and many photographs previously considered unusable can be resurrected with no effort.

As well as offering a one-step solution, NeatImage also offers a barrage of fine-tuning options that enable you to perfect your images: noise levels and reduction amounts can be independently adjusted for high, mid and low levels, and for each component of the YCC colour space, while sharpening can be added - again in YCC - if required.

If an image doesn't contain the requisite 128 x 128 square of blank wall, that's generally not a problem, as NeatImage can build a noise profile for each device and then apply it to a range of images. So if you know you're going to be shooting in low light conditions, for instance, you can first photograph a blank wall and then shoot all the images in your scene using the same camera settings: NeatImage will be able to build its profile based on the first image and use it for all the rest.

Best of all, perhaps, is the fact that NeatImage can read the Exif data from your camera and automatically match it to a profile from the vast range available for download from its website. Using this method, the filter can remove noise appropriately from any image, regardless of whether or not that 'clear area' is available.

NeatImage is available in three main varieties: the free demo, which will process images up to 1024 x 1024 pixels; the Home plug-in, which works for all standard 8-bit images; and the Pro version, which supports both 16-bit RGB and processing via Photoshop Actions.

NeatImage removes noise better than anything else we've tested. We rarely say this in MacUser, but we firmly believe NeatImage to be an essential purchase for any digital photographer. Period.