Noise Reduction

I am looking for a recommendation for a Noise Reduction plugin for Photoshop or a stand alone software program. Your advice is appreciated.

Filemon

Filemon - The two main ones I've seen are Noise Ninja and Neat Image. Both are available as trial versions (or were when I tried them out). They are pretty similar in functionality, although not in user interface, and I think both can operate as plug-ins for Photoshop or stand alone. I'd imagine that either would work about equally well. They're both reasonably priced as well, although I think Neat Image was a few dollars cheaper when I tested them.

I ended up getting Neat Image and have been very happy with it. There may be other more advanced tools out there as well, but they don't seem to be as common.

I'm using Imagenomic's Noiseware and am very impressed. It costs a bit less than Noise Ninja and Neat Image and has gotten some great reviews.

Filemon, I have Neat Image and highly recommend it. I haven't tried the others, so I can't comment on them. I would say Neat Image is some of the best money I have ever spent. It makes a big difference on your prints if you do it right. Whatever program you do get, be sure to do a lot of experimentation. It is easy to overdo the processing in some areas of a photo. You can get fractal patterns, lose dynamic range and loose color gamut. In general, you can process skies separately with greater noise reduction without having these problems. Also, skies exhibit film grain the most, presuming you are still shooting film. I would guess digital would still have the greatest noise in the sky as well. Good luck.

I'll second the recommendation for Imagenomic's Noiseware. Easy to use, tweakable, and very effective. I'd recommending getting the Plug-in version rather than the stand alone.

I use the Neat Image plug-in, that way I can integrate it in to my PDS/layers workflow. The idea is that I can keep all editing layers and the "ALT + merge visible" to get a layer that includes all the changes, I can then apply the filter to this layer and keep it without loosing all the lower layers or having to flatten the image. A standalone app woukld require flattenign and therefore loosing all layers... not much fun if you need to keep two files for every pic.
The PRO version also lets me do all this at 16 bit.

Thanks to all for your insight. I will try the demos for the products you suggested.

Filemon

I've tried both noiseware pro and noise ninja and find that noiseware pro is the more user friendly it's also a bit more agressive in it's noise reduction however noise ninja takes a bit more time to master and has more options, but once you do master it, it's clearly more powerfull.