Below are some of the most frequently asked and answered questions about Neat Image. Please feel free to ask questions regarding Neat Image by e-mail or in the Neat Image community forum.

General questions

• What is the difference between Demo plug-in and Pro plug-in /Mac?
• Should I uninstall Demo plug-in prior to installing Pro plug-in?
• Should I uninstall the older version of Neat Image prior to installing a newer one?
• I think I have found a bug. How can I submit bug report?

Filtration-related questions

• Why do I receive some crystal-like artifacts in the filtered image?
• Filtered image looks 'plastic'. Why?
• What is frequency?
• The filtration process is not very fast, is this normal?
• How to filter only the color noise (not the brightness noise)?
• What is YCrCb?
• Is processing via Neat Image best done before or after any other processing (i.e. tonal/color correction)?
  
  

The Demo plug-in is limited by size of image area that can be processed: it only processes a part of the input image if the image is larger than 1024x1024 pixels. The Pro plug-in is not limited in this respect. Please see Feature map for more details.

Usually that is not necessary. The Pro plug-in can be installed over the Demo plug-in. However if you experience any trouble with installing or running the Pro plug-in try to unistall the Demo and re-install the Pro plug-in.

Usually that is not necessary. A newer version can be installed over the older one.

Please use the online bug report form; please fill it out to let us know all the details necessary to reproduce the problem.

See more information about known bugs and bug fixes.

Presence of many residual noise elements is usually a consequence of using a poorly built noise profile or a profile built for another device and/or device mode.

The crystal-like artifacts (usually these are the residual JPEG compression artifacts) look like thin lines in the filtered image. They can be easily eliminated by increasing the high frequency noise level in the filter settings.

The reason is that too much filtration was applied. Let Neat Image keep some noise to produce natural-looking results. Adjust the noise reduction amounts; for example, reduce the noise reduction amount in the luminance (Y) channel to 50-70%.

Also, make sure the device noise profile does match the image processed. Using an incorrectly chosen or poorly built profile can both produce plastic-looking results and leave residual artifacts (see the previous question).

The term (spatial) frequency is used in Neat Image to denote image elements (both important details and noise) of specific size.

High frequency corresponds to image elements of smallest size. Medium frequency corresponds to elements of medium size. Low frequency corresponds to image elements of (relatively) large size.

This is normal, because the filtration algorithm is quite complex. We are working on further optimization to provide better performance.

Set the value of the luminance (Y) channel noise reduction amount (in the Filter settings box) to 0%. That will switch off filtration in the luminance channel and Neat Image will only filter the color noise.

YCrCb is the name of a family of color spaces widely used in digital imaging, television, image compression (e.g., the JPEG compression stores color images in this space), etc.

In 'YCrCb', 'Y' corresponds to the luminance channel, 'Cr' - to the Cr chrominance channel covering the red to blue-green range, 'Cb' - to the Cb chrominance channel covering the blue to yellow range. Because this space allows to easily separate the luminance and chrominance information it suits the needs of noise filtration.

Such operations as tonal/color correction are quite conservative. Therefore, to filter before or after tonal correction makes a little difference - as long as the device noise profile is built and applied at the same stage of image processing. For example, don't use a device noise profile built with an unprocessed image (before tonal correction) to filter a processed image (after tonal correction). Instead, build and use a profile using either only unprocessed images, or only processed images.

Some digital cameras apply some color correction internally. Other cameras allow access to unprocessed RAW data. Neat Image is a generic filter, which can be applied in both cases. The only requirement is to use profiles built and applied in the same stage of the workflow.

On the other hand, image sharpening applied to a noisy image makes it much more noisy. For the best results, we recommend to apply Neat Image filtration before sharpening (you may also want to disable the in-camera sharpening whenever possible). Neat Image's sharpening and noise filters can be used together since the sharpening is applied by Neat Image AFTER noise filtration.