Hankins Lawrence Images Photonotes August 2003

HLI PhotoNotes Volume 1 Issue 7 August 2003

Published by Hankins-Lawrence Images, LLC of Bethesda, Maryland

http://www.hankinslawrenceimages.com

It’s been a very unusual summer here in the Washington, DC area. Almost every weekend it has either been raining, or gray and overcast while threatening to rain. As photographers who mainly shoot on weekends, you can imagine how frustrating it has been.

So instead of a summer spent taking pictures, we’ve been spending an awful lot of time in our digital darkroom. In addition to our usual editing of current photos, we’ve been doing a lot of photo restoration using Adobe Photoshop. At a family reunion earlier this summer, Bill spent the day scanning old photographs. It’s really amazing what you can do to improve an older faded image – and how much time we’re spending in front of the computer rather than looking through the camera’s viewfinder.

Since we’re spending so much time at the computer – we decided to focus on a couple of software programs in this issue of HLI Photonotes. First is a review of Q-Image – a great program for printing your photos. The second is the review of the Neat Image Pro+ which has the plug-in for Photoshop. We hope letting you know about programs like these makes your time in your digital darkroom easier.

Have you ever tried to print digital photographs on your own printer? If you have, you may have run into the printing limitations of many of the standard image editing or image management programs. If you haven’t run into their limitations yet, read on, because sooner or later you probably will…

We originally purchased Q-Image (back before it was Q-Image Pro) several years ago for one simple reason – we wanted to print more than one photo on a sheet of inkjet printer photo paper. This seems like a simple enough thing to do, but at the time, many photo editing programs made printing multiple photos on one sheet of paper a real pain. Enter Q-Image Pro ( http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage/ ): this program lets us pick a template of the size photos that we would like, and simply double click on an image to get it properly set up on the page. Need three 4”x6” photos on your page? No problem. Set the template for 4x6, click on 3 different photos from a list, and you’re ready to print. Want a roughly 4x6 print of an image that doesn’t have a 4x6 aspect ratio? No problem again – simply click on it, and Q-Image will automatically resize it so that it fits within the 4x6 box as large as possible. Need a total of 200 prints with 4 or 5 different photos for your holiday cards, printed on 4” roll paper, preferably alternating so that you don’t use up only one color of ink in your cartridge and throw the rest away unnecessarily? OK – a problem, but it’s not Q-Image’s problem – the roll paper and the inkjet cartridges on our printer last for less than 50 photos.

Warning: for those of you not into jargon, you are about to get barraged. We tried to at least put the bottom line in English…

Another great feature of Q-Image is that this program has one of the best interpolation programs around if you need to enlarge your images. Essentially, most would argue that for a good sharp photo, you should have the printer print at around 300 or more pixels per inch (ppi). Interpolation lets you “estimate” the data between pixels in your image, allowing you to get a good quality print at less than 300 ppi of actual data from your image. I have not done head-to-head comparisons, but the Q-Image Pro algorithm compares favorably with (and may well be better than) those of Genuine Fractals or stair interpolation algorithms. On the website version of this article, I have some 100% size scans of an 1890’s cabinet card, which is a 4x5.5” photo which I scanned and printed a portion of in Q-Image at the equivalent magnification of enlarging the entire photo to roughly 3 ft. by 5 ft! One of the advantages of Q-Image is that it can do the resizing and interpolation for you automatically. You simply tell it what size you want the print to be, what interpolation algorithm to use (basically, you can go for better quality or better speed, and it will tell you which is which), and it figures out the rest. It does an absolutely superb job of this. It will do Lanczos interpolation, and recently has added vector interpolation, which they report as better than Lanczos (again, I have not done head-to-head comparisons on algorithms). For those not into pixel interpolation algorithms, read here that it will do a very good job on enlarging your photos.

Q-Image Pro also supports ICC color profiles, so if you have color management profiles in place for your monitor, printer, etc., it will handle these neatly and without complaint (another reason we like the program). If you aren’t using color management for a Window’s based system, there is a good chance you aren’t printing the same colors that you are seeing on your monitor, but that is a topic for a future article (when we’re really feeling brave…).

Q-Image Pro also has very powerful image editing functions, has a pretty good red-eye removal function for those of you in need of one, and even can do basic file management. We really don’t use those functions, as we have other programs that we tend to use for each. If you can use these, then think of it as an extra added bonus, because this program is well worth the price ($39.95) solely for the printing capabilities of this program. A free downloadable demo is available from their website (http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage/ ), which becomes fully functional when a registration code obtained by purchasing the program is entered. The upgrade policy is also superb – you only have to buy the program once. We have upgraded for several years without any further fees. Unfortunately, the program is only available for Windows (95 or later), although it will apparently run on Macs using recent versions of Virtual PC. We highly recommend this program.

Recently, we reviewed Neat Image ( www.neatimage.com ), a useful program for removing noise from digital images. Around the time of the review, Neat Image Pro+ was introduced, which added a Photoshop plug-in version in addition to the stand-alone version of the program. We have since updated our license, and tried Neat Image Pro+ v2.6, and found it to be every bit as good.

For those of you who haven’t read our original review of Neat Image, please check it out on our website ( www.hankinslawrenceimages.com ) in the newsletter archives section. Briefly, Neat Image is designed to reduce noise in digital images, whether the image is from a digital camera or whether it is a scanned image. It comes in several levels, including a limited function but free demo version, a “Home” version, a “Pro” version which allows for creating 16-bit TIFF files, and now a “Pro+” version, which includes the pro version and includes a Photoshop plug-in. If you want the plug-in, you have to get the Pro+ version. I was uncertain of this strategy at first (of course you have to buy the most expensive version to get the plug-in) from a buyer’s standpoint. However, after using it, I decided that while I loved the plug-in, I would want to have the stand-alone version also, so it is probably just as well that it is packaged this way.

Once you download and install Neat Image Pro Plus to your computer, a plug-in file sits in the Neat Image directory – you simply copy this file to your Photoshop plug-ins directory, and the next time you start Photoshop, it will be an option in your Filter menu. At any point in your workflow in Photoshop, you can run the filter, and filter out the noise. When you start the filter, a separate window comes up which is an exact duplicate of the stand-alone program interface, you make your choices among the filtration options, and the program then returns you to Photoshop with a cleaned image.

Why bother with a plug-in? Well, for those of you using Photoshop for your image editing, the plug-in allows you to incorporate the noise filtration into your standard workflow. Frequently, I like to review individual images before deciding on whether or not to use noise reduction – this plug-in lets me crop and do other minor adjustments, and then use the noise reduction filter if I decide it is necessary. It works in 16-bit mode in Photoshop, and, conveniently, it will work on an image with layers (which unfortunately is limited to 8-bit images, but that is Photoshop’s problem, not Neat Image). The History mode works with the plug-in too, so once you’ve filtered the image, you can click on the before filtering step in the History menu, to quickly compare the image with and without filtration. These are strong advantages to the plug-in. Without the plug-in, if you decide mid-editing that you want noise reduction, you have to save the file from Photoshop, open the image in Neat Image, filter it, save it, and reopen the image in Photoshop. Using the Plug-in is much less distracting.

The downside of the plug-in is that it is slow. However, it is no slower than running the filtration through the stand-alone program. I ran the same 16-bit 6-megapixel TIFF file (from my Canon D60) through both the stand alone program and through the Photoshop plug-in. In both cases, it took 1 minute 49 seconds to complete on a Pentium 4, 2.4GHz computer. In both cases, it did an equally wonderful job of filtering (You can see an example in the web-based version of this article at www.hankinslawrenceimages.com). I consider this a downside for the plug-in, though, because any step that adds 1.5 to 2 minutes of waiting to my imaging workflow while I’m sitting at my computer waiting to edit makes me quite impatient. This is not a major criticism of the program, as I imagine the algorithm is computationally intensive (therefore time consuming), but if I know I am going to use the Neat Image filtration, I will use the great batch filtering function on the standalone version. This batch function lets the program filter a number of files while you are off doing something else. If I decide that I need to use filtration while I am editing, I will use the Photoshop plug-in. Of course, if you automate your workflow in Photoshop, you can incorporate the plug-in into a Photoshop action.

Neat Image is an essential program for dealing with noise in digital images, whether from a camera or a scanned image. We highly recommend it. For our own use, we found that the Photoshop plug-in was a handy addition, and for the cost of the upgrade from Pro to Pro+, we believe it is worth it. If I was buying Neat Image from scratch, I think that if I was going to buy the Pro version anyway, I would get the Pro+ version; if I was only going to get the Home version (for example, if my camera limited me to 8-bit images), I doubt that the plug-in would be worth the extra expense. Current prices (as of August, 2003) are $29.90 for the Home version, $59.90 for the Pro version, and $74.90 for the Pro+ version. Their upgrade policy from one level to the next is quite reasonable – the cost of an upgrade is simply the difference in cost between the two versions. If you do not have any version of Neat Image – go to their website ( www.neatimage.com ), download the free demo, and read through their quick-start tutorial. Overall, this is a great program, and a quick try of the demo on a noisy image will convince you that, no matter which version you get, one of the versions will be a worthwhile purchase.

We have put up an example of a photo before an after filtration on the web version of this article (available at www.hankinslawrenceimages.com). The photo is of a beaver that I found on the C&O canal, taken early in the morning on a heavily overcast day, so I had to use a 1000 ASA setting on my digital camera to get a decent shutter speed. This program lets me get usable images using the 1000 ASA setting!

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