OF NEATIMAGE AND GRAINS

A few days ago, I was trying bird photography in the western ghat region and I was faced with the problem of low light. It was raining incessantly for the last few days and I was lucky to have some short dry spells. But it was still overcast and there was no sight of sun. And I had ventured into the thick jungles where direct sunlight can hardly enter. But I had a chance to see many not-so-common endemic birds and did not want to miss a chance of photographing them. So I decided to compromise on ISO and pushed it all the way up to 1600. I did manage to get decent shutter speeds and hence some pictures with out shake, but the resulting pictures were predictably not very impressive. There was lot of noise and grains in the output. But not willing to trash all the pictures, I decided to salvage them. I had heard many people recommending neatimage but had never tried it. I went ahead and downloaded a demo version. The results that came out were pretty impressive. If you profile the noise characteristics of your device properly and ensure that the setups are proper, you can virtually eliminate all the noise from the images. You can see some of the results here. I will post some of my outputs soon.

But the demo version was considerably limited, in the sense that it does not save tiff files. After some thinking, I decided to go ahead and buy the home edition. For USD30, I feel it is a very useful investment. But that keeps me wondering, why don’t the camera manufacturers install something like this in the camera itself? It saves lot of trouble for people who need to work on action photography or will have to shoot at low lights.