Price:

Dfine 2.0 lists at $99. It's $85 discounted on-line, and Academic Superstore sells it for $65 to students & teachers. Dfine 2.0 is also available in a Professional Suite of three different Nik products, including Dfine 2.0, Nik Color Efex Pro 2.0, and Nik Sharpener Pro 2.0 together for $449.95 list price, with an academic discount price of $339 at CCV Software.

System Requirements:

• Windows: Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP, or Windows Vista, Pentium III 1GHz or better, 256 MB RAM, Adobe Photoshop 7 through CS3, Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 through 5.0, or Adobe Photoshop Plug-in Compatible Application
• Macintosh: Macintosh OS 10.4 or later, G4, G5, Intel Core Solo, Intel Core Duo, Intel Core 2 Duo, or Intel Xeon, 256 MB RAM, Adobe Photoshop CS2 and CS3, Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0, or Adobe Photoshop Plug-in Compatible Application

Nik Software,
7588 Metropolitan Drive,
San Diego, CA 92108, USA
Phone (619) 725-3150
Fax (619) 725-3151.
www.niksoftware.com/index/ usa/entry.php  

Support:

 Product support is provided free via email.

Nik Software's Dfine 2.0

by Darrel Priebe  

Situation: There it is. Right there in front of you - a gorgeous evening scene just waiting to be captured. Your camera is ready. You really want this picture. You're thinking "This one could win an award." You can feel your excitement building as you start to shoot.  

Problem: Your first shot is blurry. There's not enough light! It's too dark to prevent blurring in a hand-held shot, and you didn't bring a tripod with you. Damn! What can you do?  

Solution: You increase the ISO rating in your camera, from 200 to 1600, to give you 3 more stops. Like magic, there is more available light! Now, you're shooting wide open at 1/30 of a second, more than fast enough for a hand-held shot, if you're careful. You steady the camera as best you can and take the picture. When you review it, you’re grinning, because the picture looks great in your viewfinder. You get home and download your evening's opus to your computer. Sadly, there on the monitor your prized picture looks all grainy. There are sprinkly dots, and splotches of light and color all over your beautiful shot. Yuchh! What happened to those lovely colors in the beautiful picture you saw in your viewfinder that night?  

What happened is called NOISE. Noise is the digital equivalent of grain in film. Noise is the result of unwanted imperfections inherent to virtually all digital camera sensors. Even high-priced sensors in top-of-the-line Canon and Nikon professional cameras create noise, just less noise than their inexpensive brethren. Noise comes in two variations: Contrast (Luminance) Noise and Color (Chrominance) Noise. They can be individually present in an image, but more often both are seen in the same image. What makes noise worse? Low light levels, long exposures, and high I S O speeds all add noise to your pictures. 

Definitions:

1. Noise: the often ugly result, resembling speckling or grain, when shooting digital in low light situations at higher ISO or longer shutter settings. 

2. Noise Abatement: Nik Software Dfine 2.0 - a filter for Photoshop or Photoshop Elements that easily removes noise.  

What can you do about digital noise? The expensive solution is to buy very fast, and therefore very expensive, professional lenses and cameras. A fast telephoto lens that can shoot under low light conditions can cost 6 to 8 thousand dollars. The newest professional digital cameras that produce less noise under low light conditions are also many thousands of dollars in price. But take heart, if you use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, there is an affordable solution to rescue your noisy photos. Nik Software makes a plug-in filter for the Photoshop family of software that easily removes noise from your photos, and you've got to see it to believe what it can do. Fortunately, that's easy because Nik offers a free 15 day trial period of Dfine 2.0, their professional noise removal filter. The free trial and a demo movie showing how the product works is available on their website: http://www.niksoftware.com/dfine/usa/entry.php   

How easy is it to use? Dfine 2.0 is made for both amateurs and professionals. If you like easy-to-use automatic solutions as much as I do, you'll enjoy Nik's simple 2-step process: first measure, then reduce the noise. It’s two-click easy. But Dfine 2.0 also offers powerful controls for experts. You can manually measure the location of the noise to be reduced, and  then focus the noise reduction to specific color ranges or specific objects.  You can limit noise reduction to either color or contrast noise. You click to set a point in your picture  (they call this "U Point technology), and then apply focused noise reduction with separate sliders for the color and contrast noise to the particular area.  

Control Points

Based on U Point technology, the Control Points method lets you control the amount of contrast and color noise reduction applied to specific areas of the active image.  

Since Dfine 2.0 creates a separate layer for its noise reduction results, you can easily paint-in or erase the noise reduction effects with Dfine 2.0's included brushes, or a Photoshop layers mask. If you have a group of similar photos taken at the same time, then you can save a noise reduction profile and apply it to a batch of pictures simultaneously. Very convenient! Experts may also utilize additional controls to reduce JPEG artifacts and preserve the edges as you balance detail and noise reduction.  

How well does it work? Noise reduction is always a matter of balancing the need to maintain detail and sharpness in your photos with the desire to remove the distracting visual noise. You have to decide if the de-noised picture suits your taste or not. I think Dfine 2.0 does an excellent job, even on the automatic settings. The following pictures illustrate noise reduction using Dfine 2.0, and are best viewed on a web site in color to see the before & after noise-removal effects. You can see this review on-line at either www.dazzlingphotography.com or www.topcc.org. If you are reading this in a black-and-white newsletter, the pictures below won't do justice to the powerful effects achieved with this can’t-live-without-it software.

The Empress Hotel, Vancouver , BC . Photo by the author using a Nikon D200, 18-200 VR lens, hand held, 1/13 sec exposure, I S O 1600, f3.5, 18mm focal length. Excessive noise is present due to the high I S O setting that was needed to capture this night shot. Noise will appear even more pronounced when the picture is printed.

Flag detail from The Empress Hotel photo above at 200% magnification. With Dfine 2.0 automatic noise reduction applied to the photo on the right, the noise is greatly reduced in the flag, flag pole and the night sky, with only minor softening of the details.
 

Photoshop also has a noise reduction filter available called Reduce Noise. Shown below is a 3-picture composite comparing a portion of the original Empress photo with the noise reduction benefits offered in Photoshop and Dfine 2.0. As you can see, the noise reduction offered by the Photoshop filter (far right) is minimal at best. In the Dfine 2.0 treatment on the left you can see the substantially reduced noise around the neon letters, and the surrounding black areas, as well as in the windows and brick wall.

Summary: Nik Software's Dfine 2.0 is a powerful and easy-to-use noise reduction filter which installs as a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. With Dfine 2.0, photographers can quickly reduce both color (Chrominance) and contrast (Luminance) noise that so often spoils pictures taken at night, at high I S O settings, or with long exposures. Dfine 2.0 is easy to use for amateurs, and has advanced settings for professionals which offer control over exactly how much and where to apply noise reduction. This makes it easy to reduce the noise in your images while maintaining detail and sharpness. When you really want to print that picture, but you see lots of ugly noise due to a long exposure or high ISO setting, Nik Dfine 2.0 will work its magic to produce a beautiful, almost noise-free photograph. It’s an elegant, though not inexpensive solution to a noisy problem.