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, Home, Pro and Pro+ editions of Neat Image?
• Should I uninstall Demo prior to installing Home / Pro / Pro+ edition?
• Should I uninstall the older version of Neat Image prior to installing a newer one?
• Are you going to release a Mac OS9 or OSX version?
• I think I have found a bug. How can I submit report about found problem?
• What about batch processing?
• What about other input/output formats (TIFF, JPEG)?

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 a bit slow, is this normal?
• Is the input image automatically changed according to the profile that is being opened?
• 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 edition of Neat Image has some of the advanced functionality disabled. In particular, it does not save images in TIFF and BMP formats and does not copy to the clipboard (the Demo edition only saves images in JPEG). Pro+ includes a plug-in version of the filter. Please see Feature map for more details.

This is not necessary. However, you will not need Demo anymore because you are installing the Home / Home+ / Pro / Pro+ edition, which has all the functionality of Demo plus added features.

To uninstall Demo, use the Uninstall shortcut in the Windows Start menu: Start menu->Programs->Neat Image->Uninstall. That will remove Demo. You may need to manually (re)move images and/or profiles that you put in Neat Image Demo subfolders.

Yes, this is usually necessary. Please uninstall old version of Neat Image and only after that proceed to install a new version. This will ensure that important files are not mixed up.

A Mac OSX version of Neat Image is now available.

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.

Neat Image supports batch processing starting from the version 2.0 of Neat Image.

Batch processing is also possible with Neat Image plug-in used via Photoshop actions and Photoshop batching mechanism.

Early versions of the software worked only with the BMP and JPEG (input only) formats. Since then, we have introduced support for TIFF (input/output) and JPEG (output). Please see more details in the Feature map.

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.

Note: presence of many residual artifacts is usually a consequence of using a badly build or not matching device noise profile. Consider using another profile or building a new one from scratch.

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

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.

For the reference, see the noise samples of different frequencies
in the Noise filter settings tab of the Filtration Job Editor.

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

The input image is NEVER changed. Neat Image always creates a new output image, which contains the filtration results. The output image can be saved to a new file or you can choose to overwrite the original.

When the YCrCb working color space is used, set the value of the luminance (Y) channel noise reduction amount (in the Noise filter settings box) to 0%. That will switch off filtration in the luminance (brightness) 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.