Speed vrs Quality and a few other considerations

[Mark Muse]

Vlad,

• I understand that there is a balance between processing speed and image quality. Some people want it faster and will give up some image quality, while some people want the utmost in quality and are willing to sacrifice processing speed. I happen to fall in the later camp.

Would it be possible and practical to produce a version that allowed the user to select which sacrifice they are willing to make, maybe on a sliding scale? Perhaps this selection could be part of the profile creation process and would then reside in the profile.

I would be much in favor of this, especially if it would give me the option of higher quality output than I am getting now -- which is very good, but even the best can be improved!

• Speaking of speed Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) will be released soon with full 64 bit processing bandwidth on G5s. Will Neat Image have to be upgraded to take advantage of it? Or will it be dependent on Photoshop's ability to use it? Or both?

• Sharpening in Neat Image Mac could be a better tool than it is. I usually disable it and use other tools. Perhaps this is an area for some improvement or for another plug-in?

Thanks,
Mark Muse

[NITeam]

Mark,

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. I will comment below:
I will comment on

• I understand that there is a balance between processing speed and image quality. Some people want it faster and will give up some image quality, while some people want the utmost in quality and are willing to sacrifice processing speed. I happen to fall in the later camp.

Would it be possible and practical to produce a version that allowed the user to select which sacrifice they are willing to make, maybe on a sliding scale? Perhaps this selection could be part of the profile creation process and would then reside in the profile.

Yes, this is possible. To a certain extent it is already possible in the current version of the plug-in. You have two controls that significantly affect processing speed:
- "Very low freq" (to enable reducing very low frequency noise; this slows down filtration but produces better results when the input image contains low frequency noise);
- "High quality" (to enable the high quality (and slower) noise filter as compared with the simplified version of the filter that works faster but produces a bit less accurate results).

And in principle, we could introduce even more control to balance quality vs speed. Probably we will do that in the future. Currently we are working on general improvements of BOTH quality and speed of noise reduction and while doing that we anyway make Neat Image closer to what you are suggesting.

• Speaking of speed Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) will be released soon with full 64 bit processing bandwidth on G5s. Will Neat Image have to be upgraded to take advantage of it? Or will it be dependent on Photoshop's ability to use it? Or both?

Well, of course both and not only OS, Photoshop and Neat Image code itself but all development tools should be upgraded too. Unless 64-bit development tools are available, neither Photoshop nor Neat Image will be able to fully support 64-bit features.

• Sharpening in Neat Image Mac could be a better tool than it is. I usually disable it and use other tools. Perhaps this is an area for some improvement or for another plug-in?

Yes, we do recognize that and we will gradually improve it in the future versions. Probably it will be another plug-in, this is not decided yet. In Neat Image, we primarily focus on quality noise reduction, that's why sharpening is somewhat "underdeveloped". We will work on this.

Thank you very much for your feedback.
Vlad