But it took me over a week to get NI functioning in a usable manner.Ĭheers, thing I would like to see is a way to define a user preset as the default instead of “Recent Preset”. I have 40 years experience servicing IBM equipment so I am hardly a computer Luddite. I’m very happy with NI but the documentation and usability could be improved. If there is enough interest, I will post them on my web site (some already are). If you are interested in this automation, please contact me offline and I can send the scripts. This whole process was taking over 10 hours before. Another script builds the HTML for this new folder in about 30 seconds. All this runs from the original (Nikon D200) RAW images at about 20 seconds per image. Thus in one batch step I can add my copyright info and such, create a merged layer for NI, run NI, resize the image for the web, do some additional sharpening, create a thumbnail image, and save everything in a new folder. I have written some PS JavaScripts that allow me to process these directly from the CS2 Bridge selection. Then half an hour with PS Bridge and ACR minimally tweaking exposure and such and setting the crop area for these selections. I will spend two hours selecting 40 of 250 game shots. I shoot evening soccer games where the lighting is constantly changing and usually goes from poor to worse. FYI, I am using a Nikon D200 and Kodak SLR/n and have profiled both. Clearly the usability testing was not as good as it should have been (IMHO).Īnyway, I am happy to report that I was able to achieve my automation objectives and I am delighted with Neat Image. From that point on, the NI filter continued to cancel even though the PS dialogs were turned off. In one case, I set the PS dialogs on to check the settings then cancelled NI. Or the action would record a fixed profile name. Or it would seem to work fine but actually used the last (incorrect for this image) profile. I was often getting bogus messages that no matching profile could be found. This all adds up to unpredictable PS action behavior depending on how NI was last used. Even Auto Match Preset (Actions Menu) will default to RecentPreset if a preset matching the profile name is not found. Then in the Noise Filter Settings (Tab) you need to select a previously saved Filter Preset from the fly-out selection list. The trick was to use the Action menu to set Auto Match Profile instead of the Device Noise Profile (Tab) icons. The trick is to get the new action to record AutoMatchProfile and “MyPreset” so that batch is unaffected by other NI activities. The problem is that when you then run the action with PS automation, it will use whatever you last did with NI (for some unrelated manual tweaking) instead of what you really wanted. By default these will contain RecentProfile and RecentPreset. The action records two parameters, Profile and Preset. The frustration was with getting the action to record usable options for Neat Image. The major difficulty was with recording a new PS Action for the NI plug-in. And you should have some experience with CS2 actions. If you are attempting this, be sure to read the NI docs cover to cover first. I am very impressed with the capabilities of NI but the User’s Guide and product usability could be improved. So I would like to post some comments for the NI folks. I was able to automate Win/XP NI 5.6 Pro+ with PS CS2 but only after considerable frustration.
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