Even though most of the digital cameras comes with a standard flash and the smartphones also come with LED flash (some even have two LED flashes) but these are not really any help in some very dark surroundings. The CCD sensors (charged coupled device sensor) that is used in most of the digital cameras does not really work well in extremely dark places. For it to work properly, the ambient light or the flash light has to be actually very strong. And you can see the difference yourself – try snapping the picture of an object when there is enough Sun light, and again taking the picture of the same object when it is dark – the flash works but generates too much noise. The same is also true when you try to capture some objects or people in action – running children or dancing couple, for example.
One way to minimize this noise is to buy a strong flash light similar to the ones that professional photographers use. Or you can just use a filter in your favorite image editor to remove all that noise from your digital photographs. One such software is Neat Image which is available both as a standalone software and also as a plugin for Adobe Photoshop. Unfortunately, it is not available for the open-source GIMP.
Neat Image is not free but is available with a demo license. It is engineered to reduce the noise in your digital images. It can also minimize film grain, JPEG compression artifacts and other imperfections. You can start using it by opening one or more of your digital images, selecting a sample region of these images and then generate a profile. The profile can be generated automatically, or you can manually tune the profile.
With this profile, the Neat Image can remove the noise from your images. You can fine tune the noise removal, by choosing the luminance level and the noise reduction level. If you are not happy with the results, then you can always repeat the steps once again but with a different device noise profile.
Conclusion: Neat Image is a great tool for the photographers who cannot afford the high end DSLR cameras and have to depend on the cheaper point-and-shoot style digital cameras. It can filter the noise and other artifacts from the images in three easy steps.
You can download Neat Image from https://ni.neatvideo.com/.