Digital noise has been on my mind a lot lately. And in my photography.
Probably because my camera produces tons of it and I’m always looking for the best way to get rid of it. Of course, I could get a new camera, but then there’s no challenge in that! Anyway, do you see all the pink tones and horizontal bands in this picture? That’s noise.
I’ve always used Noiseware in the past to combat noise, but now that I’ve started using Nik Software’s collection of digital photography tools, I have converted completely to their Dfine noise reducing product. I’ll do a full blown Dfine review/tutorial soon. (If you have a digital noise crisis in the meantime, download their free trial or use discount code DPM to save 15%.)
I’ve learned a lot about noise by using my noisy camera. Would you like to hear about it?
Digital Noise is an area of imperfections in a photograph that might cause it to look grainy, dirty, spotty, muddy or less than clear. Removing the noise from a photograph reminds me of cleaning sunglasses that you didn’t notice were dirty. There is usually a huge difference.
Noise is caused by a combination of the imaging sensor on your camera, high ISO speeds and/or low light. It can also take the form of JPEG artifacts, which are caused by compressing photos during the process of saving them as JPEGs.
To Avoid Noise in Your Photographs
- Use the lowest ISO you can get away with. Even when shooting in Automatic Mode, I keep my ISO to 100 or 200 in almost all situations.
- Save files as PSDs or in other non-lossy formats until you actually need a JPEG for online or email use.
Types of Digital Noise
There are two types of digital noise. One is called Contrast (or Luminance) noise. You can identify luminance noise by the lighter or darker spots appearing in a color of an image. Here’s a close-up of my daughter’s neck and chin. She’s 5 and her skin is perfect, so those darker spots you see are definitely noise.
The other type is color noise (or chrominance noise). The hallmark of color noise is out-of-place specks of red, green or blue on your image. This type of noise is often apparent in files that have been saved multiple times as JPEGs. (See my first picture above.)
Why does it matter what type of noise you have? Both of the noise reducing plug-ins that I have experience with adjust each type separately. So, in order to have the most control over your noise reduction, it helps to know.
And why would you want to have control over this process? Well, I mentioned it briefly last week. Noise reduction is the opposite of sharpening – it blurs your image just a bit so that the noise becomes invisible. So you will have to find a balance between getting rid of the noise while keeping the details of your photo.
Ok, I’ really needed to get all that noise info off my chest. Thank you for listening! I’d really like not having to deal with it at all at some point in my photographic future.
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