AGAINST THE GRAIN COME ON FEEL THE NOISE

Open up your image in Photoshop and get going with this easy photo adjustment

01 analyse the noise

Open your image up in Photoshop. To see the ISO setting used to capture it, go to File >info and click the Camera Data tab. Here you can see that the ISO speed is 1000, so there will be noise present. Click OK. Click the Zoom tool to display the image at 100%.

03 reduce the colour noise

Colour noise is easy to remove because there’s no risk of smoothing out important detail. Zoom in to 200% to see the noise more clearly. Drag the Reduce Color Noise slider to 70% to remove the coloured speckles. This leaves the luminance noise for us to deal with.

05 before and after

The Sharpen Details slider restores features that may have blurred. Drag it to 17%. Now that you’ve restored detail to the image, you can increase the Strength to 7. Click Preview to see the noisy ‘before’ version. Release the mouse to see a reduced-noise version.

02 open the reduce noise filter

Grab the Hand tool and drag it to examine parts of the magnified image. Noise is especially noticeable in darker, smoother areas such as the light reflections. Go to Filter >noise >reduce Noise. To see how the sliders work their magic, start with them at 0.

04 blurred versus Sharp

Drag the Strength slider to 6 to start smoothing the luminance noise. This blurs noise, but also blurs our subject’s important architectural details. Drag the Preserve Details slider until you get a balance between detail and noise. Here, 16% is a good compromise.

06 advanced options

Click the Advanced button. Here you can toggle through the red, green and blue channels that make up the colour image. Traditionally, the blue channel is more prone to displaying noise, so drag Strength to 3. Click OK to remove the image noise.