Image Enhancement

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Click on Smart Noise Reduction Filter and select the filter strength to apply smart noise filtering to the image. Smart noise reduction uses sophisticated image processing techniques to remove noise from digital images with virtually no loss of detail. It is particularly effective at removing noise from shadow detail and in high ISO images. Please see the Smart Noise Reduction page for more information on this filter.

 

The saturation of the image can be increased or reduced by changing the value in the Saturation edit box. A value of 100 represents no change in saturation. A value less than 100 reduces the saturation and a value of 0 gives a black and white image. A value greater than 100 increases the saturation.

 

Use the gamma setting to change the gamma of the output image. This is useful if printed images are lighter or darker than they appear on the screen. e.g. if printed images look a bit dark try increasing the gamma to 1.1 or 1.2. A gamma setting of 1 leaves the image unchanged.

 

Select "Auto level" to automatically adjust the black and white points of the image. This is a contrast enhancement technique which stretches the image's histogram so that it contains the full range of tones from black through to white. The white and black points are expressed as a percentage. This percentage represents the amount of the picture data that is at or below the threshold. e.g. a black point value of 0% means that the darkest pixel in the image is set to black. Higher values result in a higher contrast image but may cause some of the highlight and shadow detail to be lost e.g. a white point value of 5% would set the brightest 5% of pixels in the image to white and would lose much of the highlight detail. A good starting point is to set the black point to 0.2% and the white point to 0.1%.

 

Select sharpen image to sharpen and then select the sharpening method from the drop down list. Unsharp mask sharpening is similar to the sharpening method found in most image editors. The sharpening amount is expressed as a percentage in some editors (e.g. 0.7 would be expressed as 70%). The amount of sharpening required depends on the image but a good starting point is radius=0.5, amount =0.7 and threshold=0. Generally speaking images need more sharpening when printed than they do for displaying on a computer screen. Sharpening is usually applied as the last step when editing images and so if you intend to edit the image after raw conversion it is probably best to turn sharpening off and apply it after the image has been edited.

HQ style sharpening uses the same sharpening method as BreezeBrowser Pro's HQ display mode. The amount of sharpening applied is expressed as a percentage and a value between 75% and 90% will produce similar results to the HQ display mode.