Skin/Flesh texture improvment request

[foochey]

Every NR program I've used (NI, NN, an NW) all have the same problem with skin tones...especially in the facial features. They all turn to plastic. Yeah, I could create a mask in PS and omit these areas from the NR, but frankly I would like to remove some noise from these areas as well in a simple fashion if possible. I purchased NI Pro, even though it was slower than NN and NW but I thought it did a tad better job. In any event I have a question/request. I think that NI could take a HUGE advantage over the other competitors if some improvements could be made in this area. Not sure the best way to approach it as I'm no programmer. But, I think there is a huge opportunity here and whoever can create a better way to remove noise in portrait type of images will have a monopoly for a while.

Until then, is there a way to tweak the settings in NI to prevent the plastic face syndrome without losing the NR in the rest of the photo??

Thanks,

Fooch

[NITeam]

Fooch,

Thank you for the suggestion. We will certainly consider what can be done to help skin tones.

Regarding solutions that may be used right away, I would think of the following:

1) make sure the noise profile you use is accurate; re-build if necessary;

2) use the profile equalizer (available in Advanced mode) to identify the tonal ranges that correspond to the skin tones and turn down the noise levels in those ranges; this will make NI think that the noise is weaker in those ranges and it will reduce noise less agressively in areas of skin tones;

3) use the Photoshop selection tools to quickly select (based on the skin tonal range) the skin areas and then apply Neat Image filter to the whole image with normal NI settings; the masks will effectively reduce the noise reduction amount in the skin areas.

Once again, thank you for the suggestion. We keep working on improvements and your feedback is very much appreciated.

Kind regards,
Vlad

[fefifo]

I have used NI for several years and have not had problems with skin tones going plastic. I have an Olympus e300 and e1 camera and create a profile for each at the ISO settings from 100 to 1600 using NI profile test chart. I also find that NI can create an excellant profile using the auto profile function, on an image by image basis. Not on every image, but on quite a few I have tried. I know this doesn't help much in your situation, but it's another data point.

Best wishes,
fefifo

[foochey]

This works pretty well unless I have to crop, then the profile doesn't seem to work as well and I have to recalibrate the image somehow. Many times there isn't an area that will calibrate properly or I'll get the RGB error. I almost always crop a photo so this happens pretty often. It's also after cropping that I notice the plastic face syndrome at its worst. I could apply NI before cropping, but it is MUCH slower and when you have 200 or 300 shots of a night football game to go through it simply takes too long.

One note is that many times NI will try and use an area like grass to calibrate instead of a shadow/gray area, and that's when it seems to be the worst. FWIW.

-Steve