Photoshop CS2 vs NeatImage/Noise Ninja

[Ken Fong]

I've noticed that CS2 has "advanced" noise reduction. Does anyone know how this compares with products like Noise Ninja or Neatimage? Will they become obsolete?

thanks in advance

[tim]

Excellent question. I'll be installing the CS2 demo tomorrow, and I have demo versions of noise ninja and some noisy images I need to process, so i'll sit down tomorrow and sort it out. Hopefully it works well enough that I don't have to buy noise ninja, though NN isn't too expensive.

[tim]

The CS2 RAW noise reduction hasn't changed, it's still not great. The real noise reduction is a filter in PS proper. It seems to be a useful improvement over the old CS RAW noise reduction, but I think i'll probably still get noise ninja, which from my early experiments seems to do a significantly better job.

The other updates to CS2 seem very worthwhile, though they'll take a bit of getting used to. A book on it might be a good idea, depending how good the upgrade documentation is.

Smart sharpen's a great feature - a great improvement :)