Digital Photography Software

Hi, today I’m going to tell you about how to remove noise from digital photographs. Almost every one of us, who have digital photo cameras, saw dirty, dusty, grainy looking photos at least once. That’s thanking to colored pixels (grains, speckles) that are present on photos, but do not exist in the reality. Below is an example of such a picture to clarify what I mean, saying “noise”. There are several causes why the noise happens to digital photo: long exposure times, heating of the camera sensor, high ISO settings, matrix defects, small pixel size etc. I speak here (generally) about consumer digital cameras that are built on CCD or CMOS sensors. Noise is not a frequent case with digital Single Lens Reflex (dSLR). And the effect does not appear at all in traditional film photography due to the different principal of operation.

The best way to get rid of noise is to buy a digital photo camera with a large image sensor. Photo sites of such a camera are located relatively far from each other; they are larger in size, so they can catch more real light. However, because of digital image sensors require the light to fall on them directly at 90° angle, you will need some additional big lenses for you camera. Firstly, it costs a fortune. Secondly, you will be unable to carry you camera in your pocket because of the size. Thirdly, you already have a camera, you are not a professional photographer and would not spent thousands of dollars for a professional hardware just to (occasionally) make family amateur photos. Maybe, you even use you mobile phone to make those fascinating shots you upload to your pbase galleries – who knows?

I attend concerts frequently. Heavy metal is my other life. And I take pictures in terrible conditions: lack of light, high temperature. Stroboscopes heat everything they reach – people, instruments, the sensor of my photo camera. Attach to all this the artificial smoke and fog, crush and you will understand that quality concert photo is a complete fortuity!

Believe me - photographing nature or architecture is very different from photographing musicians at a concert. There is always lots of motion: fans and musicians never stay at one place for a second. You have no that time you enjoy while taking landscape pictures to prepare for the shot at a concert. Every moment is a different picture. Each shot is unique and cannot be done once again. And it is very-very pity to realize one day that a magnificent, dynamic shot is spoiled by the digital camera sensor noise or a little bit underexposed! I have great collection of such shots.

Little time ago, I was asked to prepare a music band’s concert photos for publishing on their web-site. I chose the few best ones, but there was some noise on them. I had an idea that I needed some special noise reduction phostshop pugin to help me remove the digital noise grains from my shots. I did a lot of search and test and finally, my decision was Akvis Noise Buster. This noise reduction plug-in for photoshop software (both windows and macOS) brought back to life many of my photos. It wasn’t a shame to let them go public on the band’s site. You know what? I didn’t believe that’s possible with just a single photoshop plugin. But, see yourself. The image is not of great quality of course, but compared to the original it looks much better!

Akvis Noise Buster allows reduction of (together and separately): luminance noise and color (chroma) noise. Additional options include fading, blurring and sharpening edges. It is required you play a little with the plugin options to get a quality result, but there’s also an automatic mode for those who are lazy enough. Remove the most unpleasant picture imperfection. Reduce noise. Bust the noise in the nose!