Of all the comps, only the thorough Light at the End of the Tunnel managed to hit the necessary highs while making the band's lesser material stand up by comparison. The intervening, stagnant Music for Pleasure and their later descent in gothic kitsch leave far less salvageable material. Because as great and vital as the Damned were, they produced a limited selection of truly unassailable material: the white-hot fireball of Damned Damned Damned and their psych-punk powerhouse Machine Gun Etiquette. Neat Neat Neat fights for table scraps at an already glutted table, but is further hindered by the Damned's own sordid recording history. Adding the three-disc Neat Neat Neat anthology to an array of live and "best of" comps that greatly outnumber the band's seven proper studio recordings (not counting any latter-day reunion offal) is a tough sell. And maybe that- the unexpected spark of life not present in so many other punk artifacts- explains why the Damned continue to be relentlessly compiled. That's the true importance of the Damned, in a way that my retelling of the band's convoluted history could never convey. They eschewed political poses and anti-authoritarian rants (except to piss off the mob once in a while) and just played whatever the hell they wanted and had some fun doing it. If punk ever had an ideal of doing your own thing, breaking the rules, or any of the other liberating clichés it's been reduced to, the Damned embodied that for as long as any band could. Just wanted to share, in case you want to check it out.So I listened once and forgot them for a year when I finally returned, understanding suddenly bloomed from ignorance. Controls are thorough and offer a good bit of fine-tuning. This is my first taste of version 8 or higher, which came out last fall, so sorry if this is old news. I’ve gone to this trouble just because I’ve finally found something that for me offers good noise reduction for my Fuji Raw files (Neat Image works fine on these). There was virtually no difference in print between Dfine, DeNoise, and Lightroom, to my eyes. Neat Image and DxO were quite similar, and marginally better than the other processed results. However, in print, differences in the full-sized prints were visible to me between the unadjusted Raw image and all the processed versions. This is not a definitive sampling with all variables properly considered. If you’re new to evaluating noise reduction add-ons, bear in mind that all these tools will work with varying degrees of success with different types of images, ISO levels, and overall exposure (if you’re not, you know this already). I always thought people to dissed Lightroom’s noise reduction were being picky, but I stand corrected: I realized having crammed all these strips into a composite I’d forgotten Lightroom/ACR, so here’s a simple side-by side compared to the RAW. If this has uploaded correctly, you can see a subtle difference in detail contrast and overall noise reduction. Tried to correct for the strong red saturation from the DxO conversion with limited success to equalize the samples. In any case I borrowed my daughter’s Nikon D3300 so I could include DxO in the mix. Also missing are Capture One, Noise Ninja (which I don’t have), and any number of other standalone and integrated NR tools. I have not gone to these lengths, nor did I include ACDSee in this side-by-side. Sometime last year (or maybe earlier) Glen Barrington did a pretty good and informative noise reduction study either directly here or linked to his blog, treating several products alongside ACDSee. There’s a currently active thread about DxO 11/Prime noise reduction to which a poster just now added a comment on Neat Image. This has been done before – and more thoroughly – by others. So – I ran a limited informal initial test using what I’ve got – Nik Dfine, Topaz DeNoise, and DxO – against Neat Image. I’ve since been bouncing around different tools in my arsenal with mixed results. Since I was a devotee of DxO Prime for noise reduction, this was a painful trade-off for high ISO images, since DxO does not process X-Trans raw files. I went ahead with the upgrade.Ī little context: I’m a former Canikon shooter who migrated last December to Fuji X-Trans mirrorless. Anyway, I tested it out and was very pleased at the results. As trial versions go – this is actually a “demo” – it is limited to only 8 bits per channel and a portion of the image processed in the output, but at least you can get the idea. 8.2 the other day, and downloaded a trial. I received a teaser e-mail from ABSoft about upgrading the Neat Image PS plug-in to v.
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