wood grain detail

Leo · Post by **Leo** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 7:27 am

Many of my photos are closeups of unpainted woodwork, and it appears that to preserve the most detail in wood grain, two passes work best: first pass for the Cr/Cb components and 2nd pass for Y component.

The reason for this being, in the low- and mid-frequency range the noise level/reduction setting that is best for the Y component is often too severe for the chrominance components. Again, this is for wood grain .. especially mahogany, it contains a lot of natural Cr and Cb variations in the mid & low frequencies.

But this takes time.

So if anyone knows a better technique for dealing with wood grain I'd love to hear it.

Edit: The suggestion in this thread http://www.neatimage.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1135 would solve the problem. Need more sliders.

But until then it looks like 2 passes is the best approach.

Post by **NITeam** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 9:21 am

BTW, if you use the Neat Image plug-in in Photoshop then you can automate such a double pass. - Record both passes in a Photoshop action and use it to filter those specific woodwork images. Also, if you set a noise reduction amount, say, in the Y channel, to 0% then the filter will work faster. It will be even faster if two (Cr and Cb) amounts are set to 0%. So with right settings, a double pass may be not much slower than a single pass.

More controls would indeed solve the problem. However I am not sure a larger control set would look nice and be easy to use.

Vlad

Leo · Post by **Leo** » Thu Jul 07, 2005 8:09 am

NITeam wrote:More controls would indeed solve the problem. However I am not sure a larger control set would look nice and be easy to use.

After looking closer at my workflow, I agree. I don't believe it takes any more time to do 2 faster passes (setting one or two channels at 0%, as you recommend) than it would to tweak an additional set of controls in preparation for 1 normal-speed pass.

Leo