NI instead of native D100 NR?

[mcah]

Hello all -

I'm considering purchasing NI, and have done some tests with quite positive results. However, I'm having NO luck zapping the bright, random "confetti" pixels that my D100 spits out without its native NR enabled for long exposures. For a 15 second exposure, NI beautifully reduced the surrounding noise (it was most effective on a RAW file, which is considerably cleaner to start with), but it just didn't touch those pesky bright pixels. I used a D100 ISO200 RAW noise profile downloaded from the site. I am in a situation where time is critical, and I wanted to use NI not only to improve the quality of my images but to speed up shooting. The internal NR slows things down considerably.

Is there something I'm missing?

Any suggestions are appreciated!
Andrew Tallon

[NITeam]

Camera internal noise reduction deals with hot pixels, while Neat Image treats random noise that is uniformly distributed across whole image (hot pixels are not uniformly distributed). So, you will achieve the best picture quality by combining both filters. - Use in-camera hot pixel NR and then process resulting images in Neat Image to reduce the random noise.

Hope this helps.
Vlad

[mcah]

thanks for your answer - do you know of any hot pixel zapping techniques that can be done in post? i'm trying to get my camera to spend less time thinking.

[NITeam]

There are several tools out there though I don't have names in my hands. Using camera NR to eliminate hot pixels may be more accurate though because the camera knows its own hot spots better than anyone else.

Vlad

[mcah]

thanks. i think i'll stick with the in camera NR.
just so i know, to what are those hotspots due? are they dead pixels in the ccd?

[NITeam]

Not all of them are dead. Some are in fact dead and always black, some dead and always bright, and some only become bright in long exposures. Generally, they all are due to individual properties of that instance of CDD.

Vlad