Mark D
05-18-2005, 09:30 AM
Bruce or Jeff or anyone who has experimented with both filters:
From my film days I have a large number of color negatives I am scanning and printing. I find that to get rid of film grain Neat Image does a great job, and carefully/creatively used one can avoid destroying valued image detail. It requires creating a noise profile for the particular film that was scanned and this is easy enough. Of course one can create this profile before or after capture sharpening and the character of that profile should be different depending on whether or not the grain was sharpened.
So [A] one could clean the image first with a Neat Image profile specified for the unsharpened image, and then apply PK Capture Sharpen to the cleaned image, which does restore the minor amount of acutance lost in the cleaning process. OR [B] one could Capture Sharpen first, then clean the sharpened image with a Neat Image profile specified for the sharpened image. Perhaps one may then need a Creative Sharpener stage for restoring any lost acutance.
I have been using sequence [A] on the simple logic that there is no point sharpening grain only to eliminate it thereafter, while with [B] I may need an extra sharpening step to restore acutance.
While I could spend time experimenting between [A] and [B] and comparing, perhaps your insight into this matter could spare me the need for that.
From my film days I have a large number of color negatives I am scanning and printing. I find that to get rid of film grain Neat Image does a great job, and carefully/creatively used one can avoid destroying valued image detail. It requires creating a noise profile for the particular film that was scanned and this is easy enough. Of course one can create this profile before or after capture sharpening and the character of that profile should be different depending on whether or not the grain was sharpened.
So [A] one could clean the image first with a Neat Image profile specified for the unsharpened image, and then apply PK Capture Sharpen to the cleaned image, which does restore the minor amount of acutance lost in the cleaning process. OR [B] one could Capture Sharpen first, then clean the sharpened image with a Neat Image profile specified for the sharpened image. Perhaps one may then need a Creative Sharpener stage for restoring any lost acutance.
I have been using sequence [A] on the simple logic that there is no point sharpening grain only to eliminate it thereafter, while with [B] I may need an extra sharpening step to restore acutance.
While I could spend time experimenting between [A] and [B] and comparing, perhaps your insight into this matter could spare me the need for that.