7D and Neat Image

Took some test shots at all ISO speeds on my new 7D. Did some crops and ran some through Neat Image. With my 50D I was used to seeing a 2/3 - 1 stop advantage in noise reduction using NI. Now, I am seeing about 2 f stops of improvement. Is it just me and my eyes?

That's significant. Glad to hear of your success.

I just tried it on a couple of RAW images that Tim posted on another thread.

The one thing I did notice, right off the bat, is the amount of smearing in the ISO3200 images that could not be brought back using Unsharp Mask or Nik Sharpener. I've noticed the smearing in virtually all the 7D High ISO images posted. I'm not sure it is smearing or just not very sharp at the pixel level. I've noticed this in most 7D images posted. Some I've even commented whether the image was OOF.

The 7D does seem to have a very fine/even noise characteristic which cleans up very well. It's the lack of detail which is my concern. ISO1600 is very good, imo.

I'm starting to think that there is some NR being applied to the high ISO RAW images.

For my test I only shot jpg, neutral settings. Yes, cleaned up nicely. Did not try raw yet or a good check on detail.

On a related note. The 7D files took forever to run through Neat Image. I thought my PC had hung. Must have been at least 1 minute.

I have plenty of memory and the CPU was never clocked higher that 51%, so maybe it's time to switch to a 64 bit OS. I'm waiting for my Windows 7 disks to come in.

My jpegs only took a bit longer than usual in NI. Yes, can be a problem. I have a student who told me their computer took 3-4 min. per image, whew. Mine takes about 20 sec. ??

I don't know what happened yesterday. I just tried it again with the same RAW file and it took < 10 seconds.

ACR (Bridge/Lightroom) don't have full 7D support yet. Apparently the jpeg files from the 7D are much cleaner than the raw files converted in that ACR.