Quic k and easy noise reduction

Noise reduction is not like waving a magic wand, it’s a careful compromise

Zoom in

01 You’ll need to zoom right in on the image to see the effects of noise reduction, and you can do this using the Zoom menu. You can use the cmd/ctrl and 1 shortcut to zoom in to 100%, and then the cmd/ctrl and + keys to zoom in further. We’re using the before and after view here to check our adjusted image against the original.

More noise reduction

02 Now click the Noise Reduction button under the Edit panel and make sure that the Noise Reduction box is checked. Directly below it, there’s a drop-down Method menu. By default the Faster method is selected. Underneath, you’ll see Intensity and Sharpness sliders. Try increasing the Intensity value first.

Less sharpness

03 What you may find, though, is that this doesn’t help much. Remember that noise reduction is a balance between sharpness and smoothing, and try reducing the sharpness instead. This works much better on our test image – there is a big reduction the the level of visible noise but only a slight loss in definition.