I am not a professional photographer. I am a grandmother whose granddaughter lives over 3 hours away. Most of my contact with her is through pictures that her mother sends me. My daughter has point and shoot  Pentax digital camera. A lot of the pictures Elyse sends me are grainy. After winning Noise Ninja at our monthly meeting, I began opening picture files that were hanging out on a CD because I could not bear to delete them, but they were not good enough to print or use in my slide shows. Since these pictures are memories that I was not able to physically share they are all precious to me, even if the quality is bad.

Noise Ninja was easy to download and install. While fairly simple in terms of layout and removing noise/grainy particles from digital photos, the results are impressive. You can get Noise Ninja as a plug-in for Apple's Aperature and a stand alone program as well as the Photoshop plug-in that I used. The help files within the filter are useful and easy to understand. It is recommend that Noise Ninja is used before a photo is cropped, resized or any other filters applied. Profiling the image is done as the filter is opens. You can manually profile by picking the areas that are  uniform in tone and color with no edges or detail. As I experimented with this picture I couldn't see any difference in the outcome of  automatic or manual. A noise brush is included  that allows you to exclude completely and/or partially from the applied filter. With this brush hair and fine textures can be protected.

Annotations can be saved and used in a profile loader that will apply your settings automatically every time you open photos with the data that matches previously saved noise profile.  In the pro version you can batch process photos and get more bang for your buck, by using actions within Photoshop. This is a bit beyond my Photoshop scope of knowledge, but the directions within the help files seemed easy to follow.

My photograph teacher preaches the doom and gloom of grainy high ISO's. With Noise Ninja in my Photoshop arsenal, I will feel free to experiment with high ISO's as I learn what my camera can do. The image below is a close up of my beautiful Paige after Noise Ninja was used. I love this plug-in. It's so much easier and more effective for removing noise than the tools within Photoshop. The price is reasonable and pays for itself in saved time and memories. Below is a close up of my priceless memory.