RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

Product Endorsement

Non-photographers need not read a word of this.

But if you are a (digital) photographer, let’s just run through a scenario that you might find yourself in. You’re shooting a performance, the night of that performance. Its low light and you have to be absolutely discreet. That means no flash. You’ve got a tripod, but understand that using one is frustratingly crippling. You say fuck it, put on your fastest lens, take the camera off the tripod set the ISO at 1600 and try to maximize the performance of your aperture/shutter speed.

Your results are fine but noisy as hell. You sort of cringe at the quality and clarity of the files, knowing that there’s only so much your post work can achieve. This happened to me on Saturday.

BUT

A few weeks back I remember reading about the Photoshop plugin NeatImage. Faced with a set of extremely noisy shots, I decided it was time to try it.

The results are great. The example below shows what NeatImage did with my very first attempt. (With this shot, I actually had the camera on a tripod and hadn’t yet abandoned any hopes at using that tripod in combination with a wider/slower lens.)

With a few more hours of practice, I was able to cut the noise down about as well, while preserving some of the details which that the process distorts. All in all, good tool. That’s about it, so that’s the end of this endorsement.

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