Are you sick of noise in your images?

Hey whats going on everybody, It’s Chris here to talk with you about noise in your images.

We all go out and shoot in low light or horrible light for that matter, this becomes nothing more of a product of pushing ISO. Not only will high ISO give you noise in an image but heat is also a major contributor. Most of the time we can ilinimate this issue keeping our histogram to the right, or ETTR. But not every time is that something you can do. So how do we avoid the noise??

Sometimes noise in an image is completely unavoidable. Take the image below for an example, it was shot at ISO 2000 with a shutter speed of 3 seconds. Normally when we shoot at night we can use a shutter speed of about 20 seconds before we get blur in the stars. But when you shoot the northern lights that is not possible, we need definition in the bands so we need to shoot at a faster shutter speed and open up the ISO.

So for this image I decided I should try it in Topaz DeNoise and see what happens!

Once I was in DeNoise I use the AI function, this basically analyzes the image and creates a profile based on the noise it found. I liked how well it did this for me, but I wanted a bit more detail in the sky, so I bumped up the lower slider called recover details to 0.15 . I found this noise program worked exceptionally well for me and I really liked that you don’t get the banding or chromatic aberrations some of the other programs will give you. Check out my finished image 2 images down.

So here we have it, this image had minor adjustments in Camera Raw and nothing more was done to it in Ps to enhance it other than Topaz DeNoise and I removed the lights at the end of the lake. You can use this program as a stand alone program or as a plugin for photoshop. For me I used it as a plugin as I always find is easer to use out of my filters tab in PS

If you are looking for a Noise tool check out the link below to see more about how DeNoise works.

https://topazlabs.com/denoise-ai/ref/364/

Thanks for reading todays blog on noise, stay tuned for more tutorials on how to edit images and techniques you should try when shooting out in the field.

Cheers

Chris