Currently, the best way to sharpen an image is to do it three times: Image sharpening is an absolutely key requirement in a RAW development workflow. Nothing is as good as DXOis what I wrote in my previous blog post. To be honest, I can’t believe I just wrote that. The key point is that the software produced a noise free, high quality image. I haven’t tried it yet but it sounds like a worthwhile exercise. You can help Ninja remove noise by providing a set of images that it can analyse and determine the best settings for your camera at each ISO value. With assistance from the excellent Help system, I soon found a set of options that removed the noise completely without reducing image quality. The default settings didn’t have Luminance noise reduction switched on and I could still see some noise in the image. Noise removal was how I found this tool and it provides so many Noise Reduction settings! Suffice to say, it offers a full and really good set of B&W options. My image isn’t going to be a black and white one, so I’m skipping that section. The Scenic preset had set a number of different colour’s values and the ‘out of the box’ look was really good. However, accurate color is canonical, so it provides a foundation for consistent and predictable color enhancement.” Color correction is primarily aimed at making color more accurate, but accurate color can often look a bit “flat” or bland. The color enhancement filter and the color correction filter complement one another. Photo Ninja also includes some builtin color “styles” that can serve as the basis for adjustment. This generally yields more intuitive and natural looking results. Photo Ninja applies color enhancements in a perceptual color space instead of in a mathematically arbitrary HSV-type color space. For instance, you can darken the sky, increase saturation of foliage, and alter skin tones. The filter allows targeted adjustment of specific hue ranges. “The color enhancement filter can be used to alter the hue, intensity, and lightness of colors in an image. It gives you a taste of how clear and concise their help is: I’ll let Ninja’s popup help text explain this one. It gave the image some ‘pop’ without introducing any nasty artefacts or haloing.įor this image I added some shadow recovery and, again, found Ninja to do a really decent job, without introducing any nastiness into the image. I found Ninja’s Detail setting to be excellent – not just on this image but on everything I threw at it. NIK Viveza has a Structure tool that does much the same thing. RAW images are usually a little ‘flat’ prior to processing and most tools have some way of clarifying the image. I think this option is one of the key strengths of Ninja. Of particular interest is the ‘Detail’ slider. I found the result to be excellent and left these settings alone. The Smart Lighting option analyses the image and automatically sets the options below for you. I found this to be a really rich set of options, and the ones shown here are set by the ‘Scenic Enhanced’ preset. The Help text is clear and concise and you can keep editing the image with it displayed. Notice the Help button… Clicking this pops up a Help screen explaining the options you are currently using. You can use this option to lessen this if you don’t like its appearance. Ninja’s pre-processing has already recovered some Highlight details. The Color Recovery option is interesting. You can set the White Balance manually using the sliders or by clicking a grey area of the image. The Automatic setting gives a very nicely balanced image, but for this one I left it on the From Camera setting as that looked a little warmer and more pleasing to me. For this image, I chose ‘Scenic Enhanced’ as the starting point for my efforts. Ninja, however, comes with just a handful of presets that seem to have been created by someone who actually knows what a photo should look like rather than a set of ‘look how dreadful we can make your image appear’ options. Usually! So many presets lead to horribly unnatural images that I really don’t like. Ninja works with you – you can create your own presets and select them from here, or use its own built in ones. It’s worth noting the innocent little buttons – Presets and Defaults.
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