I am experimenting with NOISE NINJA plug-in for PS CS2 and find that the auto profiling appears to give a better all-round result than the camera specific profiles. I find this surprising, though perhaps I shouldn’t? Can LL’ers who use NN please comment on this, and confirm (or deny) if this is their experience?

P.S. . . . I have used camera profiles for three different cameras, at various ISO settings, and the auto profiler beats them every time. By “beat” I mean provide superior noise reduction, coupled with retention of detail and definition.

Camera profiles are specific to a lighting and exposure situation. In addition, I shoot RAW, and the image gets well-processed in ACR before using Noise Ninja on it, which would tend to change the nature of the noise from what just shooting the target and sending the image with only the default RAW processing to Noise Ninja.

Autoprofiling each image, therefore, would deal with the noise as present in the postprocessing in my normal workflow, and therefore more suited to each image. What I have been doing is autoprofiling, and then examining at 200% just where NN places the target selections. If I find an area that should have been included, I do that. If I find one of the auto-targets in an area with actual detail, I remove that. Then I do another profile.

I also juggle the settings under Filter in NN as the defaults usually are not satisfactory to me. Sometimes they are to strong, resulting in smearing of detail, and sometimes the contrast and sharpening settings produce artifacts.

I prefer to spend the extra time when doing fine art photography, but I can understand those who need rapid processing on multiple images using preset profiles and filter settings.

It seems to me that Neat Image results using auto profiling also are better than the camera profiles -- even when making a camera specific profile from the Neat Image calibration charts. I was surprised to discover this for myself.

I think if you have a good exposure the charts work better. An over or under exposure (even slightly one way or the other) so changes the noise characteristics that it is best to auto profile.

(This advice is from a neat image user and not a noise ninja user.)

I agree with all that's been said so far. I use Neat Image, but the same logic applies.

I still keep all my custom profiles though for each sensor and ISO combination. I very frequently shoot scenes that are comepletely unsuitable for autoprofiling. Maybe the sky has a lot of thin whispy clouds that would prevent autoprofile from working, for example.