Neat Image is a noise reduction plug-in (plugin for Photoshop) and standalone application designed to reduce visible noise and grain in photographic images. Neat Image is indispensable in low-light (indoors, night, astro) and high-speed (sport, action) photography.
Neat Image has 4 tabs right under the menu: Image Imput, Device Noise Profile, Noise Filter Settings, Output.

First thing you should do is to open an input image (button is in the first tab). Here we see Neat Image supports TIFF, JPEG and BMP.

On the second tab you choose an area of the picture (make sure it’s an uniform area) and create a noise profile: Auto Profiler will automacally find, select and analyze a featureless image area that contains only noise and no important details. After that, a new noise profile is ready and the input image can be processed.

Third tab, the noise settings, is the most important part:
Noise Filter Settings:
Adjusts estimations of noise levels in luminance and chrominance channels (relative to noise profile)
- positive values -> more image elements are considered noise
- negative values -> fewer image elements are considered noise
Noise Reduction Amount:
The bigger the precent, the more amount of noise is reduced.
Sharpening Amount:
Adjusts amount of sharpening applied to luminance channel
- high values -> more sharpening
- low values -> less sharpening

Neat Image will automatically select an area in the image and prepare a preview in the selection, but, you can manually select what you want also.

Finally, the last tab has two buttons: Apply and Save.
First apply the changes made before if you are pleased with the preview results, then save the output image and you’re done!

Note: for this experiment, i used an ISO 400 image taken with Canon Powershot A520 in low-light.

Some images contain both noisy and clean areas and it may be preferable to filter only noisy areas. This can be manually done by combining two images – original and filtered one – in an image editor. For example, the following steps can be followed:

1. Filter an input image in Neat Image (so that noisy areas are well cleaned) and save the output image to a new file;
2. Open this new file in an image editor;
3. Place the filtered image in a new layer on top of the original image;
4. Adjust the transparency of the new layer so that noisy areas would look fine;
5. Select and delete the areas of the new layer where filtration is not necessary or excessive (you may want to use the eraser tool with adjustable transparency and shape).

To read more about Neat Image (considered to be the best noise reduction software) and download it, click here.

Tags: noise reduction, neat image, noise, noise profile

Now that you know what RAW is, let’s see some adjustments over a .nef file.
Picasa is a free software from Google which I found useful and helpful in many photographic situations, but when it comes to RAW editing, it’s very basic. If you take a look at the first image down here, you’ll see that raw editing is split into 3 categories: Basic Fixes, Tuning and Effects. Basic Fixes solves most of the editing necessities but is not flexible as Adobe Photoshop contrast, brightness, and curves: practically you only got Auto Contrast and Auto Color. Croping is useful and nicely done and Straighten is a function I really admire Google for the idea: it saves a lot of time compared to manually straighten that usually requires a lot of steps.

Basic:


Tuning goes deeper into the lighting adjustments, conferring the possibility to darken the shadows, lighten the highlights and adding overall atmospheric light to the RAW picture. While I consider this still pretty basic fixing, choosing the neutral color and color temperature is a little bit more than that. Picasa did a fine job with the colors, and, if you still think about improvements, in the Effects menu you got Saturation, Warmify, and Glow for further color adjustments. Sharpen, Film Grain and Blur are also present but, again, in a much more inflexible and basic form than Adobe Photoshop.

Advanced:


Between B&W and Filtered B&W I prefer filtered. Sepia and Duotone (here called Tint) are also present in the menu. By the way, I like very much the preview thumbs of the menu that helps deciding what effect to chose. Graduated Tint was a pleasure surprise from Google. For this kind of picture, like the one in my example: where a good part of it is the sky, this effect really works amazing – it gives a darker tint to the sky but no dark tint over the buildings.

Results:

Tags: raw, picasa, raw adjustments, picasa raw editing, raw editing

If understanding RAW is still difficult after what I said before, take a look at the following images from photo.net.




The 3 most known RAW formats are CRW, CR2, NEF, and DNG. A few words on them:

The Canon RAW (CRW, CR2) File Format
Canon uses two different RAW formats, and some camera models produce CR2 instead of CRW files and other models can use bouth. The Canon CRW file format is type of RAW file format and It has a structure that is fundamentally similar to TIFF. CRW files are written in Camera Image File Format (CIFF).
For extremely detailed informations about the structure of a CRW see this article.

The Nikon RAW (NEF) File Format
Nikon RAW Format is known as Nikon Electronic Format (.NEF). Nikon offer their pro SLRs with PictureProject software that includes limited control over the RAW file conversion process, and then offer the more feature-rich Nikon Capture conversion software for an added cost. Nikon’s policy was to encrypt the white balance data in order to sell their software, so with other available programs the management of .nef files is limited. While Nikon Capture does indeed offer excellent capabilities for people to manipulate images saved in NEF formats, many photographers prefer Adobe Photoshop and from now on Adobe Lightroom.

The Adobe RAW (DNG) File Format
Adobe’s Digital NeGative format, indicated as .dng, is an open standard file format available to all, without secrecy, seeking to become the next overall universal format. A quote from OpenRaw: DNG is not an open standard in that it does not document all the essential information contained in current RAW format files like NEF and CR2. In many ways, DNG can be viewed as simply yet another RAW format with undocumented information – except that DNG has the added risk that information can be lost during conversion to/from DNG and other RAW formats.

Tags: raw, raw format, raw files, raw image, raw conversion, digital raw, raw formats, raw file, iphoto, picasa, microsoft digital image, openraw, dng, nef, cr2, crw

After the JPEG compression of the camera, some images have a leak of contrast. Adobe Photoshop comes with 2 useful possibilities to increase the contrast: “Brightness and Contrast” and “Curves”. Also, there is a very basic “Auto Contrast” function which works in very few cases. “Brightness and Contrast” should be avoided because if often alters too much the tonal range of the image.

In “Image” -> “Adjustments”, select “Curves” and will firs notice a strait diagonal line. You will modify this line into a curve by dragging it down and up as shown in the image. Keep in mind to let the middle point at the same place, otherwise the picture will be overall brighter or darker than it should be. You can even obtain more than 3 anchor points but it’s not recommended, so just click on the line in the place you want the points to be. Remember to keep the Preview checkbox on to notice the changes and control what are you doing. Using this tool will give plenty of flexibility compared to other adjustment tools. Now let’s see the results:

Tags: adobe photoshop, image manipulation, contrast, brightness and contrast, curves, adjustment of pictures

Even if it’s one of the simplest manipulations of your original picture, it’s also one of the most effective. It’s very useful when the weather its self creates tones of grey and the adjustments of hue and saturation won’t help. All you have to do is to go to the Image menu in Adobe Photoshop: Image -> Adjustments -> Selective Color. Choose from the Colors the Neutrals Option and modify the tones as you wish. In my example, I added Cyan and decreased the Yellow to obtain bluish Relative (not Absolute) tones instead of grey, then a bit of Magenta to be as natural as possible.

Second I got rid of the yellowish color on the bottom of the clouds using the same method. Now let’s compare the original with the manipulated photo and conclude: it’s definitely better with the lilac clouds than the grey ones. I might have a bit overreacted with the saturation of that lilac… but hey… this is abstract not nature!

Tags: saturation, selective color, neutral color, grey, adobe photoshop, image manipulation, hue, clouds, colors, adjustment of colors

RAW images contain unprocessed image data straight from the camera’s image sensor. Since the data isn’t processed on the camera you must do it yourself on your computer in order to get it into more usable formats like TIFF or JPEG.
.raf (Fuji)
.crw .cr2 (Canon)
.kdc .dcr (Kodak)
.mrw (Minolta)
.nef (Nikon)
.orf (Olympus)
.dng (Adobe)
.ptx .pef (Pentax)
.arw (Sony)
.x3f (Sigma)

Cameras that support raw files typically come with proprietary software for conversion of their raw format to TIFF or JPEG.

However, Canon decided not to add support for their D30 DSLR in their latest release of their Digital Photo Professional software, and Nikon removed features of their own RAW converter Nikon Capture and added the encryption of features in Nikon’s D2x digital camera RAW format (NEF). As a response to this, on March 10th, 2005, OpenRAW (a Working Group of photographers and other people interested in advocating the open documentation of digital camera RAW files), coordinated by Juergen Specht, has been created.

Also, Microsoft’s Digital Image 2006 is able to recognize and organize RAW image formats such as .crw, .cr2, .tif, and .nef, which are file formats produced by Canon and Nikon. Picasa, a free image editing and cataloguing program from Google, can read and display many RAW formats, but like iPhoto (the Apple release), Picasa provides only limited tools for processing the data in a RAW file.

There is no single RAW format: different manufacturers use their own proprietary formats, which are collectively known as RAW format. Raw files contain pixel data from the image sensor usually at 12 or 14 bits per individual sensor bucket. These pixels are a mosaic of either red, blue or green values. o retrieve an image from a RAW file this mosaic must be converted into an RGB image (Demosaicing). RAW Data is preserving the maximum amount of original image data and offers greater creative control with digital images.

The contents of RAW files are often considered to be of ‘higher quality‘ than the RGB converted results, because you have finer control over the white balance, brightness, contrast, colours and saturation.

Note: RAW files are sometimes referred to as CCD-RAW

Tags: raw, raw format, raw files, raw image, raw conversion, digital raw, raw formats, raw file, iphoto, picasa, microsoft digital image, openraw

Now let’s begin the “how to make” these borders:

1. create a copy of the layer called background
2. select the content of the initial background and cut it
3. give the background the color you want for the border
4. move to the “copy of background” and in the menu “Edit” go to “Free Transform” or just press “CTRL+T”
5. How holding “Shift” resize the image from a corner, then resize the opposite corner
6. Double-click to make the resize if you are sure you got what you wanted. You now have a simple border…

7. After resizing, go to the menu “Layer” -> “Layer Style” and select “Stroke”. Modify the size and color as you wish. You now have a double border…

For a transparent border you need to follow different steps.
1. Create a copy of the layer called background
2. For the initial layer (background), modify it’s opacity to 40%
3. Now go to “copy of background” and resize the image
4. It’s recommended to add a stroke to “copy of background”

There are other ways to make the borders and you are free to discover and use other methods. When about borders, the result is what matters.

Tags: border, tutorial, adobe photoshop, photoshop, picture, picture edit

The question isn’t “why a border?”, but rather, “what kind of a border?”. Simply because a picture looks better with a border and because different photos look better with different borders.
First of all, you should know that border color depends on the photo’s colors. A photo with warm colors works better with a white border, while a photo with a black border will have cold colors. However, don’t take this as a rule: If the contrast between the border and the photo is not strong enough, you are free to use a different color.

Second, the size of the border: If you have a landscape or any other kind of picture with lots of elements, or one element made of many pieces, the border should be simple and thin. A simple minimalistic picture asks for a bigger border or a more complicated, double border. The two basic colors (black and white) can be used mixed together and in a variety of tones. If you’re still not sure what kind of border to use, I have one more suggestion: a transparent border!

Go to part 2

Tags: border, tutorial, adobe photoshop, photoshop, picture, picture edit