Noise Reduction

[pantherlax]

I shot some wrestling today in a horrible Highschool gym. :thumbdown: It was my first time and it was a great expierence, and got some good photos, and had my timing right. But I had to boost up the ISO on my d50 all the way to 1600. Ew. Its disgusting.

Anyways, how do you reduce noise/grain with postprocessing? Is it possible?

 

[Patrice]

I've heard good things about 3rd party noise reduction programs like Noise Ninja. I've never personally used one though.

 

[Garbz]

I got very acceptable images out of my D200 at ISO3200 with neat image and noise ninja. And by acceptable I mean they looked great when printed 8x5" not viewed on the screen. You'd be surprised how little noise shows up on prints.

 

[pantherlax]

Sorry do you guys know if its possible with CS3?
I tried it with this thing my teacher taught using Gaussian Blur and doing some stuff with that, but it wasnt enough help..

 

[Garbz]

No the type of thing that Neat Image or Noise Ninja do is form a noise profile of the camera based on an area which other than noise is constant in colour and luminance. It uses this as a basis for noise reduction.

All the photoshop methods work only on a per-pixel or per-pixelgroup method to try and identify noise. The biggest drawback of this is that there's a fine line between removing noise and detail. Especially with high-iso noise which is heavy in both colour and luminance noise as apposed to lower iso noise which is reasonable colour neutral, it is hard to eliminate.

For photoshop I would suggest using 3 surface blur filters each limited to each colour channel so you can fine tune what to kill.

 

[Alex_B]

I'd say NeatImage or Noise Ninja are the way to go. With Neat Image being my clear personal preference.

I think you can download trials for free. not sure if they work on full sized images though.

 

[molsen]

noise reduction in Adobe Lightroom and PS CS3 is really good

 

[Garbz]

Is the basis to that opinion that you've never tried anything else? I mean Ladas are really good cars too providing you've never driven anything else.

Check out the two packages and you'll see the difference. Noise reduction on CS3 and Lightroom work well in a few very specific circumstances. For instances the colour noise reduction is great, but luminance noise reduction takes all the detail in the photo with it. It also works really well when removing noise from a single colour channel, for instance applying the settings to blue channel only when the only blue thing in the picture is the sky.

 

[molsen]

you're absolutely right...i've never tried anything else. i was just throwing my opinion in like everyone else.

you are right that the luminance noise reduction is rather limited. honestly, i hardly ever use that as i don't mind "Grainy" images (used to be a high-iso film buff). the color noise reduction is about all i use and, yes, it's pretty great

 

[391615]

I would use a blur, if it didn't mess up the shot too much, but that may be no good if you have close up shots. I believe that if you want good shots of events like that you need a better lens, a f1.4 or something.

 

[Alpha]

Blur is a bad idea. Try one of the third-party products mentioned for general noise reduction. If you need to reduce noise while touching up skin, the paintbrush set to screen or clear mode really works wonders.

 

[Garbz]

As I mentioned in the other thread at the very least use the surface blur. If you're going to just boot the detail out the side of a moving truck you may as well preserve contrasty edges and not make it look like you don't know where your focus ring is.