The Plugin Site (http://www.ThePluginSite.com) has released a Mac OS X version of NoiseControl, a Photoshop plug-in that removes image noise while preserving details and the photographic quality of the image.
It offers sharpening, saturation and grain features for enhancing the image after denoising. You can also apply denoising with extreme settings to create painting-like effects.
According to the folks at The Plugin Site, NoiseControl distinguishes details from noise by performing thousands of clever calculation per pixel. For the best results it internally operates with 16-bit and 32-bit precision, even when processing 8-bit images.
NoiseControl offers two methods for automatically choosing effective denoising parameters. The Auto Sample feature finds and evaluates a noise sample (a uniform image area without any details), whereas the Auto Preset feature chooses an existing preset according to the embedded EXIF data (mainly the camera model and ISO value, of the photo). There are also various possibilities to manually fine-tune the denoising settings.
NoiseControl is available as a Photoshop-compatible plug-in for Mac OS X and Windows. It works in dozens of graphics applications, including Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, Photo-Paint, PhotoImpact and IrfanView among others. It supports batch processing, smart filtering and processes grayscale and RGB images with 8-bit and 16-bit/channel.
NoiseControl costs US$50; academic/educational licenses are $30. A demo version can be downloaded from http://thepluginsite.com/products/photowiz/noisecontrol/ .