I've read about the Quantum Mechanic filter's principle of operation, and have confirmed by doing L/C separations of my own digital camera images that the chroma channel is extremely noisy (both due to the CCD and of course the subsampling of the JPEG compression). How well does the Quantum Mechanic really do at reducing this noise?

I don't even have Photoshop (I do most of my image editing using GIMP) so trying out QM would be an expensive proposition, but if it really worked I would have to consider it given the cost of the hardware that is producing the images. Can anyone provide before & after samples? Would someone be willing to apply QM to a few of my D-600L images so I could see the results?

Thanks.

-- Ben Jackson (ben@ben.com), June 17, 1998

Answers

The general response I've heard from people is that it works quite well. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone I could send you to to check it out. There's a photojournalist that does a lot of work with the Kodak cameras, and publishes an on-line journal called Pixelcount. His name is Rob Galbraith, and I *think* his URL is www.robgalbraith.com. (It might be www.pixelcount.com) He seems to be much into experimenting, so might be willing to run a D-600 image through QM for you if you can track him down. Good Luck!

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), July 17, 1998.