NOISE CONTROL
James Paterson finds out which are the best noise reduction tools in Photoshop, and those you shouldn’t let anywhere near your Canon images
PHOTOSHOP CC
Noise in photos causes them to become grainy and lack fine detail. It’s especially apparent in images taken at higher ISOs, and even more so in the shadow areas of these images. Heavy-handed image editing can also lead to increased noise if you want to recover lost shadow details. But, there are tools that can help. In this project, we’ll explore some of the best on offer in Photoshop CC.
Noise reduction is always something of a balancing act, because it can come at the expense of fine detail. It would be easy to remove the noise from any image simply by blurring it, but who wants a blurry image? As such, we need tools that let us remove the noise but retain the sharpness. What’s more, we may only need to worry about keeping certain areas of the image sharp while other parts of the frame can withstand stronger noise reduction. Like sharpening, judgement is key. In general, a slightly noisy image will look better than one that looks too smooth and fake, and sometimes your images will benefit from more grain to even out the noise reduction throughout.
STEP BY STEP STAY SHARP & PRESERVE DETAIL
Balance noise reduction with retaining all-important image integrity when editing
Some of what you perceive as noise in your images may actually be JPEG artefacts. These effects occur because of the compression that JPEG images go through when they’re opened and closed, which can result in marks or blocky edges. The ‘JPEG Artefacts Removal’ filter, which can be found in the Neural Filter dialog (Filter>Neural Filters), employs machine learning to fix the artefacts.
While Median is listed under the Noise filters, it’s more of a blur filter, not the tool you should be using for removing noise. Tha
