In my previous post, I relayed the news that Google had made the popular Photoshop plug-in, Nik Collection suite, available as a free download. I took them up on their offer, and have been exploring some of its modules. In this post I want to highlight the Dfine 2 noise removal component.
I started with an under exposed RAW photo taken at night. I had my camera set on an ISO of 16,000, but even then I had to bring up the exposure in the Adobe Camera RAW editor. I then opened the image in Photoshop Elements 14. The Nik Collection works nicely with PSE. You access the various modules using the Filter menu in the Expert mode of Elements.
The only processing I did within the Editor was to apply the Dfine 2 using its default Automatic Profile settings. The results are shown below at 100%.
I may have been able to get similar results using the Noise Reduction Filter in PSE 14, but I know from experience, it would have been much more work. I am also pretty sure that tweaking the settings of Dfine 2 would have also produced better results.
Have any of you tried the Nik package yet? What do you think? I’ll report back on other modules in the suite as I further explore them. Stay tuned.