My camera is a noisy camera, especially in low light.  No, it’s not loud.  It tends to make photos fuzzy & static-y.

I bought Imagenomic’s Noiseware quite a while ago.   It is the best noise reducer I’ve ever used.  And for a while before that, I used the free Noiseware Community Edition standalone.  The free version works great, but it’s a separate program and dosen’t work from within Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

As I mentioned in last week’s Viveza review, I don’t like programs that require me to open a picture in Photoshop, close it and reopen it in another program for part of my editing.  So, I created an action for Photoshop Elements that reduces noise from within PSE so that you don’t have to jump from program to program with one image.

Now, this action isn’t as good as Noiseware, so for important or very noisy pictures, I would definitely recommend using their standalone product.  However, it works ok, especially considering that it’s free and works from inside PSE.

You can click on this picture for a bigger view where you can really see the difference.

About Noise

There are a couple of things about noise that it’s helpful to know.  First off, reducing noise is the opposite of sharpening, so it’s best to remove noise in as few of your pixels as possible.

And second, noise is usually worst in the blue channel of a photograph.  That doesn’t mean much to PSE users, I know.  But the idea is that if you can focus your noise reduction on one channel of your picture, you’ll get maximum noise reduction with a minimum of blurring.

This action sneaks the red, green and blue channels into PSE and runs the noise filter on them.  These channels are usually available only in the big Photoshop unless you “action” them into PSE.

After running the action, you will end up with three new layers, all of which are turned off and invisible.  Zoom in on your image and one by one, turn each layer on to see which removes the most noise.  Usually it will be the blue layer, but not always.

Download the DPM Noise Reducer here.

I hope you like this action!  What else is in the works at DPM?  I’m contemplating another channels based action.  You can find several free places to get actions that allow you to manipulate channels in PSE, but if you’re like me, you might not know what to do with them.  We can change that!

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