11

CHAPTER
NIGHT AND LOW-LIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY / Digital Postproduction

the noise in your image and apply selective

noise reduction. There are two different

methods used to measure the noise in your

image: the first is the automatic method and

the second is a manual method that gives you

more control over how the noise is measured.

Regardless of the method you use to measure

the noise, the real power is in the removal of

the noise, and Dfine has plenty of noise

reduction capability. You can remove the

luminance or contrast noise and the color

noise, and Dfine also allows you to remove

the JPEG artifacts, as you can see from the

controls in Figure 11-5. One other feature of

this software application is its ability to brush

noise reduction into your image when you use

the software in Photoshop and Photoshop

Elements. These brushes are very cool because

they target specific noise types:

> Background. This brush helps to reduce

noise that appears in a background.

> Hot Pixels. This brush helps to get rid of

those unwanted pixels that become visible

as bright dots, most often appearing in dark

areas of the image.

> Fine Structures. This brush reduces domi-

nant color noise and reduces luminance

noise. It tries to balance the detail and

noise in components such as hair that nor-

mally would be negatively affected by noise

reduction.

> Skin. This brush reduces both luminance

and color noise but tries to leave any fine

detail, especially in the skin tones.

> Sky. This brush removes the noise that is

most often found in the sky areas of images.

allowed to remain (although you will see more

color spots), while the lower the detail level,

the more the colors might bleed into each

other.

Just because theses sliders are in this order doesn’t
mean that you have to use them in this order.
When I apply noise reduction in Lightroom, I
usually start by reducing the color noise in the
image, then I adjust the luminance noise, and
then I adjust the sharpening slider to bring back
the detail that might have been lost when apply-
ing the noise reduction. There is no point in giv-
ing you an exact set of numbers because they
change with each image. What matters is that
you view the image at the 1:1 ratio (which is 100
percent view) so that you can actually see what
the sliders are affecting and adjust them to your
liking. Some people like to remove a lot of noise
and don’t mind the very smooth-looking results,
while others find this looks too fake and prefer to
keep some of the noise in the image.

Noise reduction plug-ins

Noise reduction has always been one of those
things that digital photographers have both
wanted and needed. Many software programs
have been developed to meet this need. Many of
these programs work with image-editing software
and are therefore considered plug-in applications
and not stand-alone programs. In other words,
they need an application like Lightroom or
Photoshop to work.

■   Dfine by Nik Software. Dfine was created by

Nik software for the sole purpose of reducing
noise in your images. Where it differs from
the noise reduction feature in Elements or
Lightroom is that it has the ability to measure