Digital Home Thoughts: Noise Ninja Photoshop Plugin (Beta 4b)

Getting Around
As a Photoshop plugin, Noise Ninja is installed to be run from the Filters menu. The interface is fairly simple and easy to navigate. The left pane contains a view of the entire image. There are controls to zoom in and out, select a preview area, create manual profile selections and set the color channel view.

The right pane contains a detailed view. Sometimes it is difficult to see noise in the larger preview window. The detail view shows a zoomed in subsection of image. After applying a profile, the detail view shows the image with the noise filter applied. There is a toggle button to show the original image and filtered image to see how successful the effect is.


Figure 2: The main window is divided into two sections.

Most cameras store images in the RGB (Red Green Blue) color space. Noise Ninja converts the image to the YCrCb color space. Y is the Luminance channel, Cr is the red-green channel and Cb is the blue-yellow channel. In the YCrCb space, luminance represents the brightness of each color in the image. Because most of the image data is stored in the luminance channel, Noise Ninja ignores the actual color and looks for edge and texture information to remove noise more effectively. The image can be viewed in luminance, red chroma and blue chroma mode. These modes make the image appear in gray scale and each level of gray represents a different brightness value. These views can show noise better than in the RGB view.


Figure 3: An example at 100% pixel crop of RGB, Luminance, Red Chroma, Blue Chroma views respectively.