For those that use Ninja here: have you guys generated your own custom profiles, and if so how did you go about doing it: did you export to .TIFF or .JPG Quality 12 to generate your custom profiles?

TIFF

Thanks Pat.

For comparison, did you have canned profiles for your camera so you could see a before and after with your custom noise profiles? If so, were they much better?

The canned profiles are intended for a image captured in jpeg with the default parameters. A developed raw file will have very different characteristics. On that note yes, custom profiles will be better at reducing noise and maintaining detail than the canned profiles. How much better will depend on the camera and how you process a raw file.

I got to wondering about that tonight: what if you use different convertors from time to time. I would imagine each convertor what have to have its own profiles to get the best out of it. Sometimes I'll use Rawshooter for certain images, and the rest of the time its ACR.

Different raw converters will put out different results but that can be minimized to some extent by disabling sharpening and noise reduction in the converter. Some converters are an exception to that such as Aperture (can create maze patterns) or Raw Shooter Essentials (which there is no clear-cut way of disabling sharpening).

You could use a single set of NN profiles for different converters if the differences noise are small enough. You'll have to test them out yourself for noticeable differences between converters to see if you can get away with using the same profile and have acceptable results.

For the absolute optimum results, you need a separate set of profiles for each converter.