noise reduction

[rebecca the curious]

what techniques can one use for noise reduction of digital photos taken with a high iso setting?

 

[sabbath999]

Depends on what camera you are using and what software you are using.

So... what camera are you using, and what software are you using?

 

[rebecca the curious]

oh, ok. canon digital rebel xti and photoshop CS

 

[Flatland2D]

There are plug-ins you can buy for CS. Two that I know of are Noise Ninja and Grain Surgery. Supposedly they both work well.

I've heard you can also convert to LAB color and apply a slight blur to the A and B channels, then go back to RGB mode.

 

[AdamZx3]

my personal favorite is using a technique in the book LAB Color, the canyon conundrum. It goes in great depth of using the lab colorspace and he essentially blurs the lightness channel and keeps the color channels clean, I haven't tried this too much but it works well. I believe its also in kelbys channels book, haven't finished that one either.

Another effective way is using plugins like noise ninja in photoshop.

One thing I learned with my DSLR, when i first started, I wan't getting good exposures and would have excess noise at iso100...getting the exposure right keeps me from using plugins or PP all the time.

 

[jstuedle]

my personal favorite is using a technique in the book LAB Color, the canyon conundrum. It goes in great depth of using the lab colorspace and he essentially blurs the lightness channel and keeps the color channels clean, I haven't tried this too much but it works well. I believe its also in kelbys channels book, haven't finished that one either.

Another effective way is using plugins like noise ninja in photoshop.

One thing I learned with my DSLR, when i first started, I wan't getting good exposures and would have excess noise at iso100...getting the exposure right keeps me from using plugins or PP all the time.

True, exposure is everything here. While we try to slightly underexpose in daylight/bright scenes to keep from blowing out highlights, high ISO/available light shots tend to have less noise if slightly overexposing them. Just 1/3 of a stop or so. The camera does not need to amplify the energy from the photosite as much, and noise is a direct result of that amplification.

 

[Garbz]

Neat image works great as a standalone program and pretty good as a CS plugin.

 

[ksmattfish]

I'm shooting raw with a 20D at ISO 800 and 1600, and as long as the exposure is good, just a little bit of color noise reduction in Adobe Camera Raw, not too heavy with the sharpening, and I think the photos look pretty clean. Recently I've been playing around with Capture One LE (free with some Sandisk memory cards), and Digital Photo Pro (comes with Canon DSLRs). They also seem to do a very good job reducing noise from raw files.

 

[MeleKalikimaka]

i find noise ninja and that merely blur the image, you lose sharpness

 

[deanimator]

Helicon Filter