The Plugin Site (http://www.ThePluginSite.com) has released NoiseControl, a further highly refined product within the PhotoWiz series. NoiseControl is a tool which effectively removes image noise while preserving essential details and the photographic quality of the image. It offers sharpening, saturation and grain features for enhancing the image after denoising. You can also apply denoising with extreme settings to create painting-like effects.

Elaborate Features

NoiseControl removes image noise and other artifacts while keeping image edges and details intact and at the same time applies sophisticated sharpening without amplifying noise. It distinguishes details from noise by performing thousands of clever calculation per pixel. Thus it is able to achieve a superior detail/noise ratio by keeping indispensable details while filtering noise. For best results it internally operates with 16-bit and 32-bit precision, even when processing 8-bit images.

NoiseControl offers two methods for automatically choosing effective denoising parameters: The Auto Sample feature finds and evaluates a noise sample, a uniform image area without any details, whereas the Auto Preset feature chooses an existing preset according to the embedded Exif data, mainly the camera model and ISO value, of the photo.

There are also various possibilities to manually fine-tune the denoising settings. You can manually select a noise sample in the preview by drawing a sample area, visually compare split views with different settings and select one of them or you can manually adjust the denoising controls. The ability to view luminance and color channels separately is an additional aid for manual fine-tuning.

In order to selectively adjusting the denoising for various image areas, NoiseControl allows you to alter the denoising parameters in shadows, midtones, highlights and nine color areas of the image. These selective adjustments can be performed with the help of sliders or by clicking on the appropriate image area with the eyedropper tool and dragging left or right.

Even Further Functionality

NoiseControl also provides various facilities known from other PhotoWiz plugins. It offers a simple mode for novices as well as an advanced mode for pro users. There are three preview tab sheets for quickly comparing and adjusting three versions of the image at the same time. A Navigator tab sheet lets you quickly scroll the preview image and the preview zoom can be set between 6 percent and 3200 percent.

Furthermore NoiseControl it support multi-core CPUs, detects your CPU's L2/L3 cache and adjusts its memory usage accordingly, which results in faster rendering. For faster preview updates there is the preview limit tool to restrict the effect to a smaller preview region.

What Makes NoiseControl Unique

In contrast to other noise reduction tools NoiseControl grants several fine-tuning methods including automatic, semiautomatic, manual and visual options. Thus it achieves superior denoising results, especially when fighting strong noise. In addition to that NoiseControl's sharpening feature makes details crisp again without side-effects.

With NoiseControl Obtrusive noise can be turned into very fine grain, thus preserving a higher photographic quality. Hence there are moderate default values and the "Control" part of the NoiseControl name. Nevertheless NoiseControl also allows to produce a soft look if desired.

NoiseControl updates the preview very quickly and still displays the effect fairly accurately at zoom levels other than 100 percent. The Plugin offers an easy to use UI and displays the result instantly.

Availability & System Requirements

NoiseControl is available as a Photoshop-compatible plugin for Windows. It works in dozens of Graphics applications, including Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, Photo-Paint, PhotoImpact and IrfanView among others. It supports batch processing, smart filtering and processes grayscale and RGB images with 8-bit and 16-bit/channel.

NoiseControl costs $50 (academic/educational license: $30). A demo version can be downloaded from http://thepluginsite.com/products/photowiz/noisecontrol/index.htm. Standalone/Lightroom and a MacOS X versions are already under development.