Noise Reduction

[boku]

Hi,

Since I had to shoot many of my photos in high ISO speed, my photographs have now turned grainy. Does anyone have any techniques to reduce noise using Photoshop. Thanks in advance.

You should let us know if you shoot digital or film. I am assuming digital, but your use of the term "grain" implies film.

Noise reduction is well covered in the many essays and threads on this website. Do some searching around.

There are two dominant Noise Processing addins for Photoshop: Noise Ninja and Neat Image. In addition, Photoshop CS2 now has built-in noise reduction capability.

[Mark D Segal]

Andrzej, do you use the Kodak GEM PRO for digital noise or film grain?

If the original post is about film grain, Noise Ninja is not the right software for that - Neat Image handles it well, but if there is also good experience for this with Kodak GEM PRO I'm interested to hear more about it.

[Jonathan Wienke]

It's only true if you don't have Neat Image set right. I use Neat Image on most of my images and don't have problems with "plastic".

[dmerger]

My experience with Neat Image is the same as MarkDS.

[prt]

Hi,

Since I had to shoot many of my photos in high ISO speed, my photographs have now turned grainy. Does anyone have any techniques to reduce noise using Photoshop. Thanks in advance.

[Andrzej Poniatowski]

Try Kodak GEM Pro plug-in! I think this is the best, all-around, very easy to use and effective noise-reduction software around. Stopped using NeatImage ever since!
I also found Kodak SHO Pro plug-in very effective for shadow recovery, much "better" than Shadow Illuminator in my oppinion.

[Andrzej Poniatowski]

I use GEM Pro for "cleaning" digital images (taken with Leica Digilux 2). All "plug-ins" are "effects", i.e. they DO "change" (distort) the image in some way or another. I think that GEM Pro, with a little bit of tweeking, delivers a "clean", nice-looking image, basically free of any noise and with all "details" intact. I found NeatImage-processed images much more "plasticky" after processing...maybe all of this is only true for Leica?

[Mark D Segal]

I agree with Jonathan. I've been using Neat Image extensively for removing grain from film scans and there is nothing plastic-y in the results. It comes out very natural-looking while retaining very good detail provided you take the time to profile properly and tweak further as necessary. It is a bit of a balancing act, but not a very demanding one.