That's one thing I hate! All the noise, noise, noise, noise! - Grinch

[Typo]

I'm stuck on how to remove the noise. Anyone have ideas how I could tackle this?

starting


where I am now


Thanks.

Mike

[Bambi]

Sometimes, I have luck with Filter.Noise>Reduce Noise, Strength 1 or 2 with everything else set to 0. Take a good look at the change to be sure it actually gets rid of some of the noise and that it doesn't make all the detail blurry. Other times, a Gaussian Blur of 0.5 works, but again, it can blur detail that you want to keep. I often then mask out the facial features so the original shows through and I keep the sparkle in their eyes!

Bambi

[dle]

You might try opening the image in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). To do this in Photoshop, choose File -> Open As and then select Camera Raw as the file type to open. The noise reduction controls are under the third tab which is marked with two pointy triangles. I've had good luck with this approach.

In addition to noise reduction, you can do quite a bit of overall adjusting with ACR.

[Mhayes]

The one thing to be careful of using Camera Raw is that you had better be sure that your default resolution is changed to 300 dpri from the default of 240, or you will SCREW things up royally if you don't and it also will change the dimension. To each his own, but I think there are enough ways without going into Camera Raw with a jpg photo.

Margie

[dle]

Sorry, I didn't mean to push any buttons here. Just offering an alternative that has worked well for me.

That said, yes, it is easily possible to screw up using ACR, as it is with many tools in Photoshop. Margie is right to point out that you want to be careful not to let ACR change the pixels-per-inch settings or the size of the image when you use it, and I should have mentioned that.

In the latest version of ACR (8.1) at the bottom of the dialog box there is an underlined piece of text that gives the color space, the color depth, the pixel dimensions and image size, and the number of pixels per inch. Clicking on this brings up a "Workflow Options" dialog box. You should check that the options in that dialog don't resize the image or change the color space in ways you don't want.

[Mhayes]

Dave, you didn't push any buttons, well maybe a small one.  ;D When I was a distributor I had on several occasions have volunteers return their restored photos at 240 dpi and the dimensions were different. I would email back and tell them not to change the dpi or the dimensions. The first time the volunteer swore she never ever changed a thing, but it kept coming back different from the original every time. Finally I asked her what her work flow was and she told me she brought the jpg into Camera Raw. What she didn't know is that the default is 240 dpi and you have to change it to our 300 dpi. Since that time, if I get a restore that is 240 dpi I ask if they were working in Camera Raw. Once changed it isn't where you can change back--yes, you can make it read 300 dpi by changing the image size---but not true to the original.

I would recommend you change the box with the dpi from the default to 300 dpi, that is the most important thing. I had a chance to do a wedding shoot with a close friend and both of us were shooting in Raw. No problem when I brought mine into Camera Raw (CS5) as my dpi is to 300. As a favor I was processing some of her shots into Camera Raw and just assumed since I had set the dpi to 300 it would be Okay. It wasn't, it went back to the default of 240 dpi, because Camera Raw was going by the make of the camera (both of us shooting with Canons, but different models). Luckily I caught the error some 25 photos later.

[schen]

Mike,

I am guessing the noise you referred to is the grainy texture in the darker areas.  It was the result of underexposure because of the forearm with white shirt on the left that shifted the metering.  If it was original, I would probably just leave it alone.

If you are talking about the small white speckles, they can be easily (but tediously) removed by spot healing brush tool.

Shujen

[Bambi]

Another thing with Camera Raw is that it automatically adds sharpening when you open a file. Members swear they haven't sharpened. And they haven't. If you go directly to the Sharpening panel (which you wouldn't if you didn't want to sharpen) you'll see what it does. You have to move the sliders back to 0.

I use Camera Raw on my other work, and it does have some great features. When I was working on the Christian wedding pix, I made a separate file to open in Camera Raw. I used the Clarity function to find detail. But I never opened the original file in CR.

In CS6, Many files can be converted from 300 ppi to 240 ppi and back again even in JPEG format without the losses that occurs in earlier versions. But old habits die hard and I'm still a little wary.

Unfortunately, Mike, Shujen is right. You just have to enlarge the picture and fix the tiny spots one at a time.

Bambi

[Typo]

Ok, leave most of the noise and tackle the waves.

I tried camera raw just to see how it went.  For me, it made no real difference - could be from using cs4 but more than likely me not having any idea what I am doing  ;)

Thanks