Noise reduction

will-jum · February 18, 2008

Shot this at 1600 ISO, any good ways of reducing the noise?

Gary Glass · February 18, 2008

You really should post this over in one of the technique forums. Whipping Post isn't the place for it. Trust me, you'll get lots of great advice.

DavidTO · February 18, 2008

I moved this to Finishing School, which is more about post processing technique than the Whipping Post.

will-jum · February 18, 2008

DavidTO wrote:

I moved this to Finishing School, which is more about post processing technique than the Whipping Post.

Thanks, sorry didn't really know where to put it, still finding my way around here!

jjbong · February 18, 2008

This is myh attempt at noise reduction. It isn't finished, and I lost some of the saturated reddish highlights in the branches, but I just wanted to show how you could get rid of the noise quickly.

The noise was in all of the channels. I went into LAB and saw that the noise was in all of the channels there, too (frequently, it's confined to the A and/or B channels). In this shot it was in L, A, and B, although in different amounts. I used surface blur on each of the channels separately, and so with different parameters. I can go into more detail, if this isn's sufficiently precise.

When I was doing this, I was looking at the individual channels and setting the surface blur parameters to get rid of the noise in each channel. A more careful procedure would be to have the whole thing visible and look at the effect on the overall picture. But there are othe ways to recover the drama that's lost in this particular noise-removal process.

Hope this helps.

Duffy Pratt · February 18, 2008

Here's what a default setting of the Noiseware plug-in did with your .jpg For noise reduction, I think the third party products are pretty miraculous. I use Noiseware, but Neat Image and Noise Ninja get raves as well.

Duffy

ivar · February 18, 2008

I don't use noise-removal a lot, but I gave this a try in LR, about 5-6 seconds:

OsirisPhoto · February 18, 2008

There is a lot of noise there, much of it is banding noise (which, in my limited technical knowledge is down to the camera / sensor). I was going to suggest you buy a better camera.. but then noticed from the image EXIF that you used a Canon 400D. Then I thought.. is my lowly 350D like that?

I shoot at ISO 1600 without too much noise, or so I thought.

So, paranoia being the mother of late night experimentation, I fired off a few low-light shots.

f/3.5 0.8s ISO1600

f/3.5 1.3s ISO1600

f/3.5 1/13s ISO1600

Quite noise free

Oh, the 2nd one is of a poorly painted wall.. that's how it really looks.

Did you 'up' the exposure in RAW conversion? There seems to be a lot of noise there. It's always possible to remedy noise in post processing, but much better to avoid it in the first place. Maybe it's a product of the lighting / atmosphere / mojo

Seefutlung · February 18, 2008

All of the well known noise reduction software works pretty much equally well.

Noise Ninja
Noiseware
and
Neat Image

Remember that an under exposed image will produce much more noise than the same image properly exposed at a higher ISO.

Gary

will-jum · February 19, 2008

jjbong wrote:

This is myh attempt at noise reduction. It isn't finished, and
The noise was in all of the channels. I went into LAB and saw that the noise was in all of the channels there, too (frequently, it's confined to the A and/or B channels). In this shot it was in L, A, and B, although in different amounts. I used surface blur on each of the channels separately, and so with different parameters. I can go into more detail, if this isn's sufficiently precise.

When I was doing this, I was looking at the individual channels and setting the surface blur parameters to get rid of the noise in each channel. A more careful procedure would be to have the whole thing visible and look at the effect on the overall picture. But there are othe ways to recover the drama that's lost in this particular noise-removal process.

Hope this helps.

Hi, the image looks good, although i dont understand most of that, was it done in photoshop, if so how? Many thanks!

will-jum · February 19, 2008

ivar wrote:

I don't use noise-removal a lot, but I gave this a try in LR, about 5-6 seconds:

Looks nice, what's LR?

SirGeorge · February 19, 2008

NeatImage
Like verything PS here are a million ways to skin a cat but my preferred way to reduce noise is with a PS plugin filter - NeatImage- which permits me to batch reduce hundreds of images at a time - it took a few second to take the noise out of the sample.
george

Icebear · February 20, 2008

will-jum wrote:

Looks nice, what's LR?

Adobe Lightroom

ivar · February 21, 2008

Icebear wrote:

Adobe Lightroom

, sorry, I could have mentioned its full name.

BinaryFx · February 22, 2008

I currently like Noiseware when in MS Win, in addition to the other common programs previously listed:

http://www.imagenomic.com/nwsa.aspx

Some links to various grain/noise topics can be found here (older info, needs updating!):

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/links.html#G

Regards,

Stephen Marsh
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx

Robinivich · February 23, 2008

Thought I'd ask a few questions in here, I'm shooting with an XT, and my only real gripe with the system I have is banding noise, if I find myself in the "use flash or else" range, with the 50 1.8 maxed out at iso 1600 and the shutter speeds dragging, I'll run into banding. Since I'm usually staying away from larger prints, and mostly just web use, fuzzy is fine, noisy is fine, dark and weird colours are fine, I can deal with these, but banding gets me. I've had the odd image that is just utterly ruined, when otherwise it might have gotten by. Underexposure is usually the cause of death, but sometimes even a (to my eyes) properly exposed image will be damaged seemingly beyond repair by banding.

Is there anything besides spending half an hour with the clone tool that can at least help with this? (I'm working with DPP and CS2, and open to suggestions)

Worst case scenario:

After an attempt to lighten the image and correct white balance

As always thoughts cross my mind about "is my camera's sensor defective?" I've heard vague mention of AI-Servo Auto Focus on the 50f1.8 resulting in banding, I'm hoping this is just normal, in which case maybe there's a workaround I can do...

Noise reduction

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