Noise is caused by the inherent randomness in measuring a signal, and the nature of light itself. In bright light, the signal to your camera is strong, and noise might be almost impossible to see. In dim light, though, noise is hard to avoid.
However, there are so many techniques of noise removal that it can be hard to pick which one to use. They range from the basic tools in your Raw developer to third-noise removal tools powered by AI. How can you choose the right method?
If you find that your software is softening too many details in your main subject, you still may not need to buy a dedicated noise reduction software immediately. Instead, try using local adjustments to do manual, selective denoising.
Selective noise reduction is when you apply noise reduction more severely to areas where noise is more obvious, like blurred backgrounds. I use careful, selective denoising on virtually all of my noisy images.
What software did I use in order to get a good result like this? Some $200 AI-powered tool? Nope! It was just the basic tools in the open-source software Darktable, which I applied selectively to areas with high noise.
There are quite a few dedicated noise reduction tools today. Many of them are built around subject recognition capabilities, where they will selectively apply noise reduction at different levels in different parts of the image.
ON1 NoNoise AI is yet another AI noise reduction program and it can operate as standalone or plugin for Affinity, Adobe Lightroom, or Capture One. To be honest, I was very disappointed in using ON1 NoNoise AI 2023 for a variety of reasons.
I recently found a website called AI Image Enlarger and they have a denoiser (found here) that apparently also uses an AI algorithm. I tried the same image of the Black-capped Chickadee, but its algorithm was pretty bad, with the final result having large amounts of chroma noise.
Of course, gear can help too. If you can upgrade from an f/5.6 lens to an f/4 lens, you will save a stop of light. And portrait photographers are very lucky in this regard, because the best portrait focal lengths often have lenses with f/1.8 or even f/1.4 maximum apertures, which will surely make your portraits less noisy compared to an f/2.8 lens.
Sure, in some cases, noise can be very distracting. As a wildlife photographer, I often take shots of subjects against distant backgrounds, and noise distracts from the transition between a sharp subject and a smooth background. I do want smooth backgrounds in photos like this:
In other cases, though, noise might not be so distracting, and you might just want to remove the chroma noise and leave some luma noise for a grain effect. Even if you do remove noise, a very small amount may not be visible at normal viewing angles or in a print, where the texture of the paper can hide some noise.
Jason Polak is a bird and wildlife photographer from Ottawa, Canada. He has been interested in photography ever since he received a disposable film camera as a small child. His career as a mathematician led him to move to Australia in 2016, where he started seeing colorful parrots. A few casual shots with a lens completely unsuitable for birds got him hooked, and now wildlife photography is his biggest passion. Jason loves to show the beauty of animals to the world through photography, and one of his lifelong goals is to photograph five thousand species of birds. You can see more of Jason's work on his website or on his YouTube channel.
Scared of noise? Not really the issue. Most of us that have bought or invested in noise reduction software, is because we are up against a wall on what and how we photograph, and noise basically ruins the appearance.
Given that I was considering much more expensive options of faster telephoto primes, or $5K plus camera bodies that handle low light better, etc. spending $120 was a much better option to improve what I do with what I have.
I agree with that. Everyone needs to have their priorities. It is worth noting that faster telephoto primes have other advantages besides reduced noise. They also AF in lower light, produce a shallower depth of field, and are often sharper and have better rendering and corners.
Noise is not a result of demosaicing, at least in the sense that noise comes from the inherent physics of reading a signal and the randomness of light. It is true that changing the demosaicing algorithm can change the noise pattern, but even a monochrome sensor without any color filter array will still exhibit noise.
My biggest post-processing challenge in photography is image noise. Unlike studio photographers who can precisely control every aspect of lighting, I've been photographing most of my campaigns handheld in natural light for more than 15 years.
I'm a travel photographer shooting regional lifestyle photography for different agencies all around the world. Because of how I shoot and travel, including the desire to be less conspicuous for my own safety, working with strobes generally isn't appropriate for me. My primary light source is the sun in the golden hour, and my style is very breezy, natural, and spontaneous, which means I sometimes shoot at higher ISOs.
But controlled lighting is not always an option. Flash photography is often banned or unfeasible in certain environments. Can you imagine popping off a flash during a sacred wedding ceremony or climbing a tree in the wilderness to set up a nice rim light for a perched eagle?
But unwanted noise can be quite extreme, and the detail in your photos will suffer. Some high-end cameras certainly handle noise better than prosumer models, but every high-ISO photo could be improved upon with the help of noise reduction tools in post-production.
Shooting artistic portraits helped stretch my creativity beyond the commercial photography I shoot in the day, and since the photos were designated for low-res Instagram posts, I was able to focus more on the mood and feeling rather than precision output.
Then, the career of a jazz singer I regularly photograph took off, and suddenly, the work I had produced was being printed onto full-size posters and shown on Spanish TV. Awesome! But that meant reprocessing some of those low-light high-ISO portraits to a cleaner commercial standard suitable for high-resolution display.
Unfortunately, I learned Lightroom doesn't quite cut it when you're working with heavy noise. My goal was to achieve a silky-smooth background (which required pushing the Luminance slider way up) without losing texture in the details. Here was the result in Lightroom working with my ISO 6,400 portrait, which needed to be prepped for a large-format print:
I needed something more powerful than Lightroom. A photographer friend recommended DeNoise AI by Topaz Labs to solve my noise issue, and I gave it a try. I only needed a light touch of the noise reduction and sharpening sliders before the noise was fully corrected. As you can see, the DeNoise AI results were quite good:
The noise reduction output with DeNoise AI was exactly what I was looking for: a smooth, noise-free background without obliterating skin and hair texture. Here's a comparison alongside the Lightroom output and the original noisy image:
I reached out to the CEO of Topaz Labs last summer to chat more about the technology and ended up partnering with them to supply ongoing images and feedback for all of their AI-powered photo editing applications. When they recently asked me to check out their latest beta of DeNoise, I decided it was high time to take a deep look at other popular noise reduction solutions. Do other applications offer better noise reduction, more intuitive editing options, or a better workflow? Let's find out. On to the challenge!
Website: Adobe Lightroom
Price: $9.99/mo USD
Pros: Robust industry-standard raw photo editor
Cons: Noise reduction can soften details at higher ISO, software is only available by monthly subscription
Lightroom is my default raw image editor, and it's served me well for many years. While generally, the noise handling does just fine, I've found that increasing noise reduction to accommodate heavier noise muddles up the image.
Working with the raw CR2 file with some minor exposure adjustments, I had to pump up the Luminance slider quite high to smooth out the noise, and the result was a more buttery texture in the foreground. Sharpening was limited before artifacts became too extreme. Here's the final output:
I only needed about 30% power on the noise reduction slider before the background was clean. I was able to ramp up the Sharpening slider to 100 without any artifacts to help bring in detail from the feathers. Using the Recover Original Detail slider, I brought back some of the texture. As always, I was impressed with DeNoise AI. The results are sharp and clean. Take a look:
The options here were surprisingly limited (no sharpening tools), and the output quite poor. The entire image looks like it's underwater. I had hoped that the output would be better than the preview. Nope. Dfine 2 couldn't maintain any detail with its noise reduction tools:
We had a wide variety of results with the noise reduction challenge. I'd love for our audience to decide the winner! You'll see our targeted problem areas in our original photo to compare the output across all these applications:
If you're passionate about taking your photography to the next level but aren't sure where to dive in, check out the Well-Rounded Photographer tutorial where you can learn eight different genres of photography in one place. If you purchase it now, or any of our other tutorials, you can save a 15% by using "ARTICLE" at checkout.
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