Noise reduction

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Noise reduction attempts to remove chrominance (colour) and luminance (lightness) noise from images which have been captured under less than perfect conditions.

Noise results typically:

• From shooting at high ISO
• From correcting levels on images which were underexposed
• From aggressive tonemapping
• From very long exposures

Most Nikon cameras can be set to noise reduction in camera. However, with the exception of Long Exposure Noise Reduction, this softens the image.

For good noise reduction, the image should be developed from Raw, with sharpening turned off. The built in Raw noise reduction of Photoshop or Nikon Capture may be sufficient to deal with noise.

Failing this, a number of commercial plugins are available which deal with noise more aggressively, which include

• NoiseNinja
• NeatImage
• Visual Infinity Grain Surgery
• Nik Media Dfine
• Imagenomic Noiseware Professional