Below are some tips and tricks that can help use Neat Image more efficiently. Please offer your tips and tricks by e-mail or in the Neat Image community forum.

In some cases, the banding effect may appear when applying noise filter to images with faint gradients of brightness. This effect is quite rare for normal images, especially when viewed on true color display.

It can be more visible on hi-color displays. (That is common for such displays. If display doesn't have enough colors then image looks as having some bands of the same colors. Dithering is usually used to mask this problem on such displays.) An original image to be filtered usually contains some noise, which plays a role of dither. When Neat Image removes this noise, the problem of banding comes up again. One solution is to use a true color display or a better image viewer (in hi-color), which applies some dithering automatically.

To avoid banding try to reduce the noise reduction amount for high frequency component to 50%.

Some images contain both noisy and clean areas and it may be preferable to filter only noisy areas. This can be manually done by combining two images - original and filtered one - in an image editor. For example, the following steps can be followed:

1. Open the input image in your image editor;
2. Place a copy of the image in a new layer on top of the original;
3. Filter the top layer in Neat Image plug-in (so that all noisy areas are well cleaned);
4. Adjust the transparency of the top layer so that noisy areas would still look fine;
   
5. Select and delete the areas of the top layer where filtration is not necessary or excessive (you may want to use the eraser tool with adjustable transparency and shape).