Experiences with reducing CCD noise under Linux
A prerelease is currently available for Linux, and albeit the purchase system asks you to pick whether you're using Mac or Windows when buying a license, the license works just fine on Linux. The interface is slightly funky in places, but gives a lot of control and nice preview. It's also pretty speedy and can kill just about any amount of noise you care to throw at it, though at some point your sharpness suffers. Absolutely usable. I can also mention that
PictureCode?, the company selling
NoiseNinja?, has been fabulous on their customer support for me, answering my letters personally within less than an hour and with extra and useful help on the slightest hint. Thank you!
Usage notes
Grass can easily get reduced down to an ugly blur. I found it workable to do only a slight reduction in luminance and heavy reduction in color. This leads to something akin to classical film grain, which is kinda nice.
NoiseNinja? themselves suggest either creating a specific camera profile (though I took the 350D profile available, so that's probably not useful) or using the brush to undo part of the noise reduction. Maybe the brush can be used to reduce different areas differently? Handy.
DNoise
Java program in open-source. Uses the Swing/AWT toolkit, and thus is rather horrible interface-wise. The initial file dialog is some 20000x20000 pixels! The design of the interface is also crappy, the program is slow, there's no preview, and I couldn't get it to do any significant removal of noise. Practically unusable.
Claimed in some places to have Linux support. Doesn't appear on their website.
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LarsClausen - 04 May 2006
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