I am having some issues with my images coming out of Neat Image properly. It does an excellent job removing grain, but the final result appears to have lower color depth than the original. If you don't know what I mean, take a good long look at your amazing desktop that you downloaded off this site and then change your graphics display from 32bit to 16bit. What happened??? It isn't quite that severe, but I don't like having color and shading lines in my image. Is there a way to bypass whatever step is downgrading the quality of jpeg?
I find the program a little difficult to grasp and control sometimes
if you're referring to "banding" in gradient areas (like skies) it is apparently a common trick to "add" noise to counter the banding .. so .. maybe removing grain is bringing this problem to the forefront
A The reason is that too much filtration was applied. Let Neat Image keep some noise to have natural-looking results. Adjust the noise reduction amounts; for example, reduce Y channel amount to 50-70%
In some cases, the banding effect may appear when applying noise filter to images with faint gradients of brightness. This effect is quite rare for normal images, especially when viewed on true color display.
It can be more visible on hi-color displays. (That is common for such displays. If display doesn't have enough colors then image looks as having some bands of the same colors. Dithering is usually used to mask this problem on such displays.) An original image to be filtered usually contains some noise, which plays a role of dither. When Neat Image removes this noise, the problem of banding comes up again. One solution is to use a true color display or a better image viewer (in hi-color), which applies some dithering automatically.
To avoid banding try to reduce the noise reduction amount for high frequency component to 50%.
Thanks, thanks, and thanks. You would think that these billions and trillions of colors offered to us these days would be enough, but apparently not. Upon further investigation, I discovered that Neat Image ordinarily converts them to 24bit colordepth upon processing with the option to change it. Unfortunately, 24bit is the only option offered. I could probably avoid this whole limited-color deal by in RAW, but I have heard bad things about Canon's provided software and I am lazy. :-)
As for your comment about me being a "freelance photographic assistant", you should know better than that. All I do is sweep floors, empty the garbage, and occasionally pack up those little boxes that power studio strobes. "Seen but not heard" they say, so I am not allowed to ask questions. :-)
SAY GOOD-BYE TO gradient BANDING
If you've printed an image with a gradient in it, you're probably familiar with banding (a visible line where one color ends and the next starts, like bands of color, instead of a smooth transition from one color to the next). There's a very popular tip for getting rid of banding that's very effective for high-resolution imaging. Open the image in photoshop and go under the Filter menu, under noise, and choose Add noise. When the Add noise dialog appears, for Amount enter 2, for Distribution choose Gaussian, turn on the Monochromatic checkbox, and then click OK. You'll see a little bit of this noise when viewing the image onscreen, but when printed at high resolution, the noise disappears and hides the banding. We add noise to every gradient we create for just that reason.
I mentioned this to PhilcUK and he said something, like, "if any of my students are having trouble breathing I mention adding grain to an image and their mouths drop open .. the color returns to their cheeks .. and I don't have to call the nurse"
I could have that wrong, though, it's been a while .. ;o)
Hey stuffnstuff, i got the same issue with my neat image, specially when batching more images, and i was trying all kind of things, but something funny happened, i closed the program, open it again, batch inmediatly (didn't touch anything) and the issue didnt appear!!, BUT when you batch again, the issue comes back, really weird!, try it yourself, open the program, batch some files then batch again and compare the difference.