Too Much Noise in your RAW Photos?

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 Winning the Noise Battle


It's nice when you take picture and it turns out looking great right out of the camera isn't it? The colors are smooth, the shadows look smooth and even within the given areas of shades of shadows it looks good. And it prints well. That's what we are all looking for. But when you are inside or outside on a gloomy day and the sky is covered with clouds, which at this time of year may well be quite dark from threatening storms, sometimes we get photos that we cannot go back and take and they are full of noise. The noise I'm referring to is the grainy look within color areas or shady areas because of a lack of sufficient light.Here's a photo that's clearly too dark to be acceptable.
Now here is that same photo lightened up with a simple Brightness Control and it looks better, but when you zoom 100-200% to examine for printing some issues remain.
You'll want to take a much closer look, in this case I'll crop to the lower right corner only, then zoom 100%. You'll see within both the color areas and the dark areas some noise which might have been corrected when shooting, but since they were not, now you have to take further steps to deal with this within Photoshop.
So if this print is printed it will not be a good print. Take a close look and you'll see what I mean. You'll want to reduce the noise using the Color and the Luminance sliders in Camera Raw. Make sure the sliders are both set at zero to begin with, then begin to slowly slide them each to the right, increasing them so that the noise is reduced in the image. If you move too far to the right you'll accomplish reducing the noise but at the expense of sharpness. There will be a happy medium, a point at which you'll have to compromise noise reduction for an acceptable level of sharpness. If you find this makes it also an acceptable print then you have met your challenge.





On the other hand you could have taken care of this before it happened in camera settings. We'll deal with that step in another article. Thanks for reading and let me know if this helped below in the Comments section.


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