11 Replies to Noise Reduction Techniques:

1. 

   Steve

   February 3, 2012 at 3:29 pm

   Thank you Liz….good stuff to know!!

2. 

   Lee

   February 4, 2012 at 1:13 am

   Excellent. I really appreciate the side-by-side comparison; you convinced me.

   Liz, will the noise-reduction routine work as well with JPEG’s opened in camera raw? Or, does this only hold for RAW photos?

   • 

     Elizabeth

     February 6, 2012 at 11:34 am

     When you open a JPG inside of the Camera Raw dialog, the Noise Reduction tab is still available. I would, however, caution you before you use it. With JPG images, the detail of the original photo does not hold up as well and it’s extremely easy to over-do it.
     I did try out the same technique from this video on a few of my own noisy JPGs and it worked quite well – I was really happy with the results. Definitely give it a shot and don’t go overboard!

3. 

   Bruce

   February 4, 2012 at 7:25 pm

   I was amazed at the difference between the two techniques. Having tried the PSE version and not noticing much improvement I pretty much stopped trying to reduce noise in most cases. As I mostly shoot in RAW anyway I will be using this method a lot more.

4. 

   Greg

   February 12, 2012 at 6:34 pm

   Thanks Liz, this really is handy stuff. I’ve often wondered which one to use and when. Can you tell me if you have a preference over Camera RAW or Lightroom 3′s noise reduction – if you use the latter that is.

5. 

   Gerald

   February 15, 2012 at 5:23 pm

   Is the noice reduction any different for .jpg files in Elements 9 or 10? I am using Elements 9.

6. 

   Thomas

   February 15, 2012 at 5:35 pm

   Learning every day. Thank you Liz.

7. 

   Clay

   February 19, 2012 at 7:50 am

   In addition to Liz’ great info, many of you might like to know that you can also open any JGP image in Camera Raw, and then use the noise reduction and any of the other terrific tweaking features on it. This is particularly helpful, for instance, when dealing with scans of older family pictures or images you took with your camera phone or small point-and-shoot. (Face it, we all have a few of those!)

   To do this, simply go your FILE menu and choose OPEN AS. Locate your JPG image file, and then in the “open as” drop down list (at the bottom) choose Camera Raw. Your JPG will now open in Adobe Camera Raw just like a raw file and you can proceed to tweak. VERY useful! This is the best way I’ve yet found to apply noise reduction to noisy JPG files without having to buy a separate piece of dedicated, expensive software.

   Best wishes and good tweaking, everyone!

8. 

   Clay

   February 19, 2012 at 7:53 am

   Although there was some dialog about opening JPGs in ACR before I posted the last post, I thought there might be folks who didn’t know how to do that. So forgive me if it seemed redundant.

9. 

   Duane

   February 19, 2012 at 4:54 pm

   This works great! I had a photo shot in poor light with so much noise that it was unusable. It was shot in jpeg, so opened in in raw and used this technique, it made a decent photo of it.

10. 

    Bob

    February 20, 2012 at 5:13 pm

    Liz, good stuff, thank you!!! Glad to know it will work on .jpg’s, too!

Tell us what you think.

You must be logged in to post a comment.