Noise Ninja is a program for noise removal. It comes as a standalone program and as a Photoshop plug-in. Licenses cost between $35 and $80 and are available at www.picturecode.com.

The functionality of the tool is basically comparable to GEM, but Noise Ninja is gentler on the texture of the image. Especially with grainy slides, the erratic sprinkle of color dots often leads to unpleasant images after scanning. On the PictureCode website, there are many ready-to-use profiles for the grain patterns of popular scanners; but these are to be used with caution, since the profiles depend not only on the scanner model, but also on the combination of scanner and film.

The noise reduction often works very well, but its effectiveness depends very much on the image. Different sources on the Internet consider Noise Ninja to a better choice than GEM, but I do not fully agree with that evaluation. Each method has its own characteristics which you either like or don’t like. As already mentioned, Noise Ninja is gentler on the texture of the image, but in all cases, corrections using noise reduction suffer a loss of detail as a side effect.

The correction mostly removes the unwanted sleety grain texture.