Lightroom and Noise Ninja

*hwblanks* · 08-01-2008, 04:05 PM

I've been thinking about getting Noise Ninja, so I won't be quite so afraid to crank up the ISO on my K10 when I need to. I know that Lightroom doesn't work with plugins, so I would be using NN as a standalone program. I shoot mostly in RAW and use Lightroom to convert to JPG. Do any of you use this combination? If so, how do you work NN into your workflow?

Thanks!
Heather

*tybeck* · 08-01-2008, 05:29 PM

I don't use Lightroom and have RAW Developer (RD) instead as my RAW converter. Like Lightroom, RD does not have plugin architecture. If I have images that I think NoiseNinja (NN) will do a better job with noise reduction I just output those photos as 16-bit TIFF files from RD and have NN take a crack on them. For my first pass on a large number of pictures I process them in NN's batch mode and output processed JPEGs. For some shooting conditions/parameters I have may own noise profiles so I just use those most of the time, but the image profile function seems to work fine as well. For the pictures that don't come out well with the profiles and default settings I re-process them by hand.

Derridale · 08-04-2008, 04:43 AM

Heather - have you considered Elements 6? It DOES have a plug-in architecture, works well with Noise Ninja, and adds several other manipulations that Lightroom doesn't do.

You can then specify Elements as your external editor in the Lightroom preferences, flick the pic out to Elements, do the Noise Ninja limbo, then ooze it back to Lightroom.

You can also try some of Elements' other tricks, like Magic Extractor, etc....

Some fun stuff in there to be sure.

Elements isn't expensive, but does a large amount of what Photoshop does plus some extras that Photoshop doesn't do.

Just a thought....

deejjjaaaa · 08-04-2008, 11:07 AM

Originally Posted by hwblanks

I've been thinking about getting Noise Ninja, so I won't be quite so afraid to crank up the ISO on my K10 when I need to. I know that Lightroom doesn't work with plugins, so I would be using NN as a standalone program. I shoot mostly in RAW and use Lightroom to convert to JPG. Do any of you use this combination? If so, how do you work NN into your workflow?

Thanks!
Heather

It seems to me (though I use it rarely) that BibblePro (v4.10.1) v/ NoiseNinja "embedded" (not Basic - the full one) is working better than CS3 w/ NoiseNinja plug-in from the same setup.

*hwblanks* · 08-06-2008, 08:10 PM

Actually, at some point, I'm planning on getting Wacom's Bamboo Fun tablet, which actually comes with a full version of Elements 5.0. For $93+change, this is a great deal, even if Elements isn't v. 6.

Amazon.com: Bamboo Fun (Small) Black Tablet with Pen, Mouse & Graphics Software: Electronics

Noise Ninja and it's great capabilities will help me be less afraid of using the higher ISOs on the K10D. My long-term fix for the noise issue is a K20 or another body better capable of handling noise at high speeds, but the software option is a lot cheaper at this point.

Heather

*RollsUp* · 11-18-2008, 03:05 AM

Originally Posted by hwblanks

I've been thinking about getting Noise Ninja, so I won't be quite so afraid to crank up the ISO on my K10 when I need to. I know that Lightroom doesn't work with plugins, so I would be using NN as a standalone program. I shoot mostly in RAW and use Lightroom to convert to JPG. Do any of you use this combination? If so, how do you work NN into your workflow?

Thanks!
Heather

I just found out that if you have the standalone version of NN the latest Noise Ninja 2.1.2 standalone software now integrates with Lightroom.
You can watch the video tutorial on how to set it up and use it as an external editor here.

krypticide · 11-18-2008, 03:23 PM

My issue with this is you get like 50 MB TIFF files. Do you keep them, or delete them when you're done?

*RollsUp* · 11-19-2008, 08:13 PM

The few times I've used it so far I have exported them as jpeg and deleted the tiff file.

mtngal · 11-21-2008, 08:45 AM

I've been playing a bit with this combination - I recently changed platforms and used that as justification to upgrade to Lightroom 2. I've always used Neat Image in the past, but decided to get Noise Ninja instead, hearing how much better it was. I was rather disappointed in the results I got from using just LR and NN, especially if I were also asking LR to resize the picture when I exported the final image (didn't have Photoshop for a while while I was making all these changes).

Are there any specific settings that work better than others for NN? It seemed like I got more smoothing than I wanted, and less ability to sharpen (things became rather wavy) than I used to have with Neat Image/CS2. Was that the sharpening tool in Lightroom 2 or the noise reduction in NN?