Optimal settings for batch jobs?

questions about practical use of Neat Image
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malamut
Posts: 11
Joined: Thu Dec 14, 2006 7:13 am

Optimal settings for batch jobs?

Post by malamut »

Hello,

after a lot of preparations, I recently fixed quite a lot of pictures with NeatImage in a batch run. Checking the results, I found that it seemed to work fine in the cases where device noise profiles were available.

In the other cases, though, when I was forced to use Auto Profiling, I got some really horrible results. NI completely overreacted on several of those pictures. Complete faces were reduced to pink blurs, like you see sometimes in pictures where the identity of the person must be hidden. I'm not exaggerating.

Granted, those pictures did not have any uniform areas which would have been suitable for profiling. I can understand that no good NR was possible. I would like to be able to say to NI, though: whatever you do, don't overprocess. If you don't have a device profile and you cannot analyze the picture well, just skip it, or limit yourself to actions which are certain to be safe. Question: is it possible to tell NI to do anything like that?

My second question is about the Auto Fine Tune of the profile using the data from the image to process. I have not seen major problems with it so far, but my question is: is it safe, or could I run into gross overprocessing similar to the full Auto Profile?

Best regards,
malamut
NITeam
Posts: 3173
Joined: Sat Feb 01, 2003 4:43 pm
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Post by NITeam »

Thank you for the suggestion regarding skipping some "difficult" images where no reliable profiling is possible. I guess this could be implemented as a kind of option so that you could choose how NI should work in batch.

Regarding auto fine-tuning, it is not supposed to make a pre-built profile (that you load and then auto fine-tune) any worse than it already is. Therefore, if you use a high-quality reusable profile set and load one of those profiles and then auto fine-tune it using, say, a "difficult" image, then the filtration results will be as good as if you used that profile without auto fine-tuning, or better (which is the point of doing auto fine-tuning).

Vlad
malamut
Posts: 11
Joined: Thu Dec 14, 2006 7:13 am

Post by malamut »

Hi Vlad,

thanks for the answer, which was quick and useful as always!

Best Regards,
malamut
jgayman
Posts: 5
Joined: Fri Jan 23, 2004 2:26 am

Post by jgayman »

During the winter months I find myself photographing a lot of indoor sports and other activities. I am using a Canon 1D-MkII and typically shoot at ISO 1600 or 3200. My normal batch process is to use a profile called "remove half noise and sharpen". This profile results in nearly perfect images. They retain all of the original detail and just enough noise is removed. The sharpening makes them crisp without all the nasty after effects that result when sharping high ISO images with Photoshop.

I've had folks ask about my workflow and comment these are the best ISO3200 images they've ever seen.
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