Heal the noise

Find out which are the best noise reduction tools in Photoshop, and those you shouldn't let anywhere near your photographs

- James Paterson

James Paterson

With over a decade as a writer and photographer behind him, James knows exactly which Photoshop and Lightroom tools and techniques matter most.

Noise in photos causes them to become grainy and lack fine detail. It's especially apparent in images taken at higher ISOs, and even more so in the shadow areas of these images. Heavy-handed image editing can also lead to increased noise, especially if you're attempting to recover lost shadow details. However, there are tools that can help. In this project, we'll explore some of the best on offer in Photoshop - and some to avoid.

Noise reduction is always something of a balancing act, because it can come at the expense of fine detail. It would be easy to remove the noise from any image simply by blurring it, but who wants a blurry image? As such, we need tools that let us remove the noise but retain the sharpness. What's more, we may only need to worry about keeping certain areas of the image sharp while other parts of the frame can withstand stronger noise reduction. Like sharpening, judgement is key. In general, a slightly noisy image will look better than one that looks too smoothed out, and sometimes images will actually benefit from more grain to even out the noise reduction.