Neat Image 9.1

Taking noisy photos under certain circumstances is sometimes hard to avoid even for professional photographers. Having to put up with those noisy images forever is no longer necessary. Neat Image comes with all the algorithms you need to clean up your best shots from unwanted luminance, color, banding, salt-and-pepper, or electronic interference noise, leaving them as crisp and clear as you always expected them to be. The program can also get rid of film grain and some digital artefacts, such as JPEG compression and in-camera noise reduction artefacts.

Neat Image is a well-structured software tool designed for both amateur and professional photo lovers that you can use either as a standalone application or as a plug-in for Photoshop. The program offers a free Demo version, a Home version, and a more comprehensive Pro version. If you intend to make commercial use of the images you process with Neat Image, you’ll need the Professional one. Both the Demo and the Home versions offer roughly the same features and for non-commercial use only, the output file format (i.e., the image resolution) being the main difference between the two.

The program offers an Auto Profile feature that will analyze the selected image and will perform a one-click automatic correction that will remove most (if not all) of the existing noise. You can always tweak a few things and define your own noise reduction levels to create the best profile for that specific shot. Likewise, you may want to customize the filter so that it only works on the color noise, the luminance channel noise, or both, and thanks to its before-and-after preview approach, you can try as many different settings as you need until you get that perfect picture.

Neat Image can be as simple or as complex as you wish and your knowledge about how digital photography works allows. It is equally useful for beginners and professionals. The former will find the Auto Profile feature more than satisfying in most occasions, while the latter will be able to fine-tune their cleaning processes, perform partial filtrations (of the noisy areas only) using various layers, and filter an unlimited number of pictures in batches.