Neat Image plug-in for Aperture 6.1

Neat Image plug-in for Aperture 6.1 is a flexible filter designed to reduce visible noise and grain in digital photographic images. It is a tool for owners of digital cameras, flatbed and slide scanners; and is for use by both professional photographers, and digital image processing enthusiasts.

Neat Image not only reduces the high ISO noise associated with image sensors in digital cameras and scanners, it can also reduce the film grain visible in scanned slides and negatives, JPEG artifacts of overcompressed images, and color banding, and at the same time makes images sharper. Neat Image is indispensable in low-light, wedding, sport, and action photography. Neat Image is a noise reduction plug-in for Aperture.

All in all, Neat Image is not only the highest-quality noise reduction solution available, it is the most cost-effective solution as well.

Major Features:

1. Premium Noise Reduction and Image Sharpening
   • Advanced Noise Filter to reduce noise and grain in digital images: Neat Image incorporates the most advanced noise reduction algorithms in the industry that surpass the quality of all classic noise reduction methods and even that of the wavelet-based methods. Although the wavelet-based methods were developed only 10-15 years ago and still considered relatively modern, Neat Image uses an even newer and more efficient approach to noise reduction. This approach enables drawing a more clear distinction between noise and details in noisy images. This helps Neat Image reduce more noise and better preserve true image details in digital photos and scans.
   • Complete control over the noise filter to achieve desired level of noise reduction: Neat Image provides direct access to virtually all important noise filter settings. For every channel component and spatial frequency component of input image, you can adjust the noise level estimation and specify how much of the detected noise must be removed. Default filter settings work very well and if you want to tweak filter then the complete control is under your tips.
   • Smart Sharpening Filter to make images look sharper without amplification of noise: Neat Image includes an intelligent sharpening filter. Working together with the noise filter, the sharpening filter makes the image look sharper without any degradation of image quality (which is usually inevitable with noisy images). Neat Image sharpening has a halo-free mode.
   • 16-bit image support to fully utilize capabilities of modern image acquisition devices: The professional editions of Neat Image fully support 48-bit RGB and 16-bit grayscale images. This capability complements the recent advances in both hardware and software technologies (for example, Aperture 2) used in professional digital imaging.
2. Aperture plug-in
   • Aperture plug-in to integrate Neat Image noise reduction in Aperture-based workflow: Using Neat Image plugin in the Aperture environment you can streamline your image processing workflow. You can process individual images manually and you can process batches of images using Aperture-style batching. Neat Image plug-in for Aperture can be used with the following version of Aperture: Apple Aperture 2.1 or newer
   • Any file format supported by Aperture: Any file format supported by the plug-in host can be processed by the Neat Image plug-in. For example, you can open a PSD, TIFF, JPEG, JPEG2000, RAW, DNG, etc., image in Aperture and then directly process it with the Neat Image plug-in.
3. Device Noise Profiles
   • Device noise profiles to make noise reduction device-specific: Neat Image uses device noise profiles - reusable analysis of noise properties of particular image acquisition device (digital camera, scanner, etc.) working in a certain mode. This makes Neat Image noise reduction custom-tailored to devices described by noise profiles and provides the highest accuracy of noise reduction.
   • Auto Profile to automatically build profiles for your camera or scanner: Neat Image can automatically make necessary noise analysis of the input image to build a custom noise profile specifically for this image. You can also manually select a featureless image area for noise analysis and let Neat Image do the rest automatically.
   • Profile Viewer and profile quality indicators to help you build accurate profiles and control profile quality: Profile Viewer provides detailed information about a noise profile: analyzed noise sample, measured noise levels, device data. The profile indicators show whether a profile was accurately built and fine-tuned. Using quality profiles is the most important step to quality noise reduction.
   • Profile library: a rich set of free ready-made noise profiles: There are many free sets of noise profiles for digital cameras and scanners prepared by Neat Image users and made available in the online profile library.
   • Auto Match for automatic matching of noise profiles to images: When a ready-made profile set is available, Neat Image can automatically select the profile that best matches the input image based on its EXIF data. This capability is especially useful in batch processing supported by Neat Image plug-in.
4. Visual feedback" Embedded preview for any selected image area: When adjusting the filter settings, you can immediately see the preview results in a selected image area. You can select any area and move selection across the image to get better feeling of how the filtered image will look like as compared with the original.

Enhancements:

1. Graphical noise profile equalizer is now available in Advanced mode
2. Manual fine-tuning of noise profile is now also available
3. Improved image viewer:
   • Several alternative viewer modes are now available
   • Adjustable viewer brightness to make noise in very dark or very bright areas more visible
   • Preview is automatically prepared and updated, either in the whole visible image area or in manually-selected image area
4. Built-in Calibration Target is now available in plug-in
5. Improved metadata (EXIF) compatibility with the latest Nikon cameras
6. Several minor bugs are fixed

Requirements:

• Mac OSX
• Aperture 2.1
• Intel Core or PowerPC G4, G5
• 1 GB RAM
• True color display