https://www.shutterbuggs.com/ - Noise reduction is an important detail to consider when editing your photos in Photoshop. Today with digital cameras, noise can be quite evident, especially when shooting in low-lighting conditions. Now, noise alone can be the influencing factor as to whether or not a photograph is successful or just considered as poor quality. Inside Photoshop there are several options that can choose from to assist in the removal of noise, dust, and even scratches from an image. And depending on what you’re actually trying to attempt to remove will actually determine which tool is the right tool for the job.
Now, before we get started, if you’re working with Adobe’s Camera Raw, please utilize the noise removal sliders inside the details panel, as the more that you can actually do to the raw file itself and the actual raw file and the actual raw conversion process, the better quality results you’re actually going to achieve. So moving on, the two filters that you want to test out for your own noise removal are located in the main navigational menu underneath filter, noise, and then what you’ll find is you’ll find dust and scratches, and you’ll also find ‘reduce noise’.
Now, before we proceed, as you can see I’ve currently got two photographs open. I’ve got an image from a previous tutorial that was actually quite under-exposed and we actually used the HDR exposure adjustment in order to sort of bring it back to life and sort of fix up its density, and I’ve also got an image across here which is an older photograph, so it has a lot of dust, a lot of scratches and a lot of sort of imperfections. So we’re going to have a look at both the dust and scratches and the remove noise adjustment in Photoshop for both of these examples.
So let’s just quickly zoom in on this particular image. Now, this image was taken, and it was actually taken underexposed on a Canon 20D. So as you can see, it has quite a bit of noise overall in the image. Now, the first thing we’re going to actually take a look at is the Dust and Scratches Filter. So if you go up to Filter, back to Noise, you’ll find dust and scratches. Now, essentially, dust and scratches provides an adjustment that is only controlled by two sliders: the radius and the threshold.
Now, the radius, if you start to actually drag the radius left to right, or enter a value in the actual text box, what you’ll find is that the radius actually determines the size of the actual area search for dissimilar pixels. Now obviously a radius that is actually quite high with a threshold set at zero does some pretty drastic adjustments to your image. But as you can see, just setting it as one pixel, and if we just turn the preview on and off, you’ll notice that it’s made the image a lot softer and sort of reduced the overall grainy, noisiness of the image.
Now you also have the threshold, so when you first start you’ll want to have the threshold at zero, but as you actually progress and actually add as certain radius to your Dust and Scratches dialogue box, what you want to do is you want to play around with the threshold, or the levels value that’s here. Now, the threshold determines how dissimilar the pixels should be before they’re eliminated, and you’ll notice that they primarily affect levels and the values between zero and 128 more-so than that of the higher values up to 255.
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