I've been using Noise Ninja for a couple of years, though now I only need it for high ISO captures. Recently I've started using Photokit Sharpener to improve my sharpening. My question is should I reduce the noise in the image before or after running Photokit capture sharpening?

While Photokit adds layers, Noise Ninja alters the background layer. Since Photokit gets it's data from the background layer, altering the background after running Photokit seems like a bad idea. But I figure someone here knows more about this process than I do, and this sort of scenario wasn't covered in the manual.

If you use this pair of plug-ins, do you flatten the image afterward? I can always go back to the raw capture (DNG), so it's not REALLY permanent.

Thanks in advance,

Jim

You want to run Noise Ninja before the capture sharpening and subsequent image manipulation.

If you are worried about maintaining a complete history of layers, starting with the original background layer then your only choice is to duplicate the background layer before noise reduction and then swapping the copy with the background layer afterwards. Photokit will always merge the background and subsequent layers when creating the manipulation layers.

Personally, I wouldn't bother since you are starting from Raw/DNG and could always recreate the background layer if you needed to. It seems like a lot of work for little benefit, plus significantly larger PSD file size, to try to keep both the original and noise reduced layers. YMMV.