The major difficulty was with recording a new PS Action for the NI plug-in. The frustration was with getting the action to record usable options for Neat Image. The action records two parameters, Profile and Preset. By default these will contain RecentProfile and RecentPreset. The problem is that when you then run the action with PS automation, it will use whatever you last did with NI (for some unrelated manual tweaking) instead of what you really wanted. The trick is to get the new action to record AutoMatchProfile and “MyPreset” so that batch is unaffected by other NI activities.
This was not simple. The trick was to use the Action menu to set Auto Match Profile instead of the Device Noise Profile (Tab) icons. Then in the Noise Filter Settings (Tab) you need to select a previously saved Filter Preset from the fly-out selection list. Anything else will cause problems later. Even Auto Match Preset (Actions Menu) will default to RecentPreset if a preset matching the profile name is not found.
This all adds up to unpredictable PS action behavior depending on how NI was last used. I was often getting bogus messages that no matching profile could be found. Or it would seem to work fine but actually used the last (incorrect for this image) profile. Or the action would record a fixed profile name. In one case, I set the PS dialogs on to check the settings then cancelled NI. From that point on, the NI filter continued to cancel even though the PS dialogs were turned off. Clearly the usability testing was not as good as it should have been (IMHO).
Anyway, I am happy to report that I was able to achieve my automation objectives and I am delighted with Neat Image. FYI, I am using a Nikon D200 and Kodak SLR/n and have profiled both.
I shoot evening soccer games where the lighting is constantly changing and usually goes from poor to worse. Thus, very high ISOs to capture action. I will spend two hours selecting 40 of 250 game shots. Then half an hour with PS Bridge and ACR minimally tweaking exposure and such and setting the crop area for these selections. Then the fun starts.
I have written some PS JavaScripts that allow me to process these directly from the CS2 Bridge selection. Thus in one batch step I can add my copyright info and such, create a merged layer for NI, run NI, resize the image for the web, do some additional sharpening, create a thumbnail image, and save everything in a new folder. All this runs from the original (Nikon D200) RAW images at about 20 seconds per image. Another script builds the HTML for this new folder in about 30 seconds. This whole process was taking over 10 hours before. Without the benefit of noise reduction.
If you are interested in this automation, please contact me offline and I can send the scripts. If there is enough interest, I will post them on my web site (some already are).
I’m very happy with NI but the documentation and usability could be improved. I have 40 years experience servicing IBM equipment so I am hardly a computer Luddite. But it took me over a week to get NI functioning in a usable manner.
Cheers, Rags
rags@compuserve.com
www.rags-int-inc.com
