Band Aide 2.5 review
DownloadBand Aide is an Adobe Photoshop filter plug-in that reduces or eliminates luminance noise.
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Band Aide is an Adobe Photoshop filter plug-in that reduces or eliminates luminance noise. Band Aide was originally created for the "banding" noise that plagued high ISO photos from early versions of the Nikon D1 digital camera.
However, it is still very useful for removing more common types of noise such as "shadow noise" from underexposed photos, increased noise from high ISO photos, and "long exposure" noise that is created by taking long exposures lasting seconds or more.
Types of Noise
Shadow noise occurs in the dark areas of photos (the shadows). If a photo is underexposed and then later brightened in software with operations such as "levels" or "curves", the overall noise of the photo will be increased. However, this noise becomes especially apparent in dark and/or flat areas.
High ISO noise occurs when the ISO setting in a digital camera is increased to the higher range of its available ISO settings. However, the amount of high ISO noise depends on the camera model and especially the sensor that is used (CCD, CMOS, etc). In general, a camera that has large pixes (the area of each pixel sensor) should create less noise for a given ISO than a camera with small pixels, but other factors affect the amount of noise. An example of a sensor with large pixels would be a large sensor (e.g. for professional SLRs) with a small megapixel count (e.g. 2 megapixels). An example of a sensor with small pixels would be a small sensor (e.g. point-and-shoot digital camera) with a large megapixel count (e.g. 8 megapixels).
Long Exposure noise (or "dark current" noise) occurs when the time of exposure or the temperature is increased. This noise is really a per-pixel "noise gain" factor, and the noise pattern should be consistent for a given camera, exposure time, ISO, and temperature. One way to help reduce this noise is to subtract a "noise reference" photo taken by the camera at the same ISO, exposure time, and temperature, and in complete darkness. However, this can be a challenge to accomplish and manage.
Band Aide is designed to remove large amounts of luminance noise. Some cameras don't have much luminance noise, but rather color noise. Camera Bits recommends using the Quantum Mechanic™ Pro filter plug-in to remove color noise. Quantum Mechanic works differently and has only minimal effect on significant amounts of luminance noise, which is what Band Aide is designed to handle.
Noise and Sharpening
One of the biggest problems with luminance noise is that sharpening the photo will make the noise worse. This is especially true in the shadows or dark areas of a photo. Since the sharpening of photos is bound to happen at some point during pre-press, it is always a good idea to minimize the noise before sharpening your photos. In fact, the effects of reducing noise by Band Aide are most noticeable on photos that are sharpened afterwards: noisy photos sharpened directly are much worse than noisy photos that are filtered by Band Aide and then sharpened.
Here are some key features of "Band Aide":
Cleans-up Shadow Noise
Maintains Edge Detail
Improves Post Sharpening.
Limitations:
20 uses or 2 weeks trial.
Requirements:
Adobe Photoshop.
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