Digital noise, the errant flecks of tone or color on your photos, isn’t the problem it once was. The current crop of Digital Cameras produce superior results at high ISO settings compared to the cameras available just a few years ago. With that in mind, there are still occasions when you need to clean up a noisy image. An ounce of prevention of noise is a great noise reduction trick which is a helpful addition for any photographer’s bag of digital darkroom tricks.
The single best noise reduction technique is judicious exposure. The number one cause of digital noise is not high ISO settings; it’s underexposure. If you’re still in the habit of setting your camera to – 2/3 of an f-stop, like many photographers did with slide film, stop. You need to retain yourself to expose accurately, if not slightly overexpose. Keep in mind that breaking old habits often means you’ll run into some roadblocks here and there. However, once you become accustomed to exposing properly for digital, you will reap big rewards.
You need to overexpose your photos slightly to put more of the image detail in the right half of the histogram. This will give you better shadow detail and less noise, and it’s significantly faster and more effective than any noise reduction technique.
Sometimes you have to rescue an underexposed picture. When this occurs, you’ll want to perform as many adjustments as possible in camera raw. This is one area where performing your corrections on the raw file gives markedly better results than performing the same corrections on a processed image.
After you’ve lightened the image sufficiently, it’s time to tackle the noise. Whenever you perform noise reduction on an image, you’re faced with a tradeoff. Noise reduction inevitably removes image detail. So you can opt for more detail and more noise, or less detail and less noise. Even though some degree of compromise is unavoidable, the following techniques will help shift the odds in your favor.
The single best noise reduction technique is judicious exposure. The number one cause of digital noise is not high ISO settings; it’s underexposure. If you’re still in the habit of setting your camera to – 2/3 of an f-stop, like many photographers did with slide film, stop. You need to retain yourself to expose accurately, if not slightly overexpose. Keep in mind that breaking old habits often means you’ll run into some roadblocks here and there. However, once you become accustomed to exposing properly for digital, you will reap big rewards.
You need to overexpose your photos slightly to put more of the image detail in the right half of the histogram. This will give you better shadow detail and less noise, and it’s significantly faster and more effective than any noise reduction technique.
Sometimes you have to rescue an underexposed picture. When this occurs, you’ll want to perform as many adjustments as possible in camera raw. This is one area where performing your corrections on the raw file gives markedly better results than performing the same corrections on a processed image.
After you’ve lightened the image sufficiently, it’s time to tackle the noise. Whenever you perform noise reduction on an image, you’re faced with a tradeoff. Noise reduction inevitably removes image detail. So you can opt for more detail and more noise, or less detail and less noise. Even though some degree of compromise is unavoidable, the following techniques will help shift the odds in your favor.
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