What Is & How to Do Image Noise Reduction

Image noise reduction is vital for shooting visually appealing, clear, and crisp images. Today, we’ll delve deeper into image noise to help you understand the causes of digital noise in modern photography and learn how to eliminate it using various tools and image noise reduction techniques.

Our article will help you tap into the reliable noise removers for photos to minimize and remove grain from your images and create more detailed and cleaner images.

What Is Image Noise?

Image noise refers to random variations of unwanted artifacts such as color and brightness that make images look all grainy. It can significantly reduce the overall clarity and quality of a photo.

If you’re dealing with digital photography, you’ll encounter two common types of image noise:

• Luminance noise – refers to variations in image brightness, giving photos a grainy appearance;
• Chrominance or chroma noise – refers to the appearance of color artifacts and splotches in a photo.

Since these two techniques often work against each other, image noise reduction can lead to a severe loss of photo detail.

How does Photo Noise Happen

Noise commonly occurs when you shoot photos using higher ISO settings. High ISO instructs the camera sensor to enhance the signal to capture more light to make an image look as clean and clear as possible.

The camera’s sensor is another main factor that can cause noise in digital photography. Smaller sensor pixels capture less light, requiring you to shoot on higher ISP settings to mitigate low-light issues. Because of that, cameras with smaller sensors tend to capture more noise, making your photos look lower in quality and unprofessional.

Though high ISO settings can help add artistic texture or effect to an image, they can also decrease the overall quality of a photo due to overly enhancing the sensor’s output signal, causing more grain.

How to Denoise Images While Shooting

Here are some useful tricks you can tap into to denoise your photos while shooting and ensure you get top-class image quality when rendered:

1. Shoot in RAW format – the RAW file format lets you accurately capture all critical image information from your camera sensor. The more data you have, the more effective your editing will be. Images captured in RAW format give you more denoising options, making editing simpler and easier.
2. Use a remote shutter release – a remote shutter release enables you to capture multiple photos without touching the camera, thus minimizing the amount of shake and resulting image noise.
3. Get a good-quality tripod – keeping your camera still is crucial to preventing any vibrations that might lower the quality of your images by introducing noise into your photos.
4. Use a noise reduction filter – you should use this filter when shooting with a long exposure to reduce potential image noise, smooth out the captured images, and make them more editable. Adjust the radius and strength when applying the filter to reduce the noise in your photos.
5. Set ISO to low – lower ISO settings tend to produce cleaner and sharper images with less visible noise.

Best Tools for Image Noise Reduction

Now that you know more about image noise and noise reduction, let’s delve deeper into the best software tools to remove noise from images.

Picfect: Photo Noise Removal With High Efficiency

Picfect fully focuses on bringing you an all-in-one photo management, enhancement, and editing tool. You can tap it to remove image noise, enhance clarity, and reduce color banding across multiple images. Moreover, you can effectively remove grain from images in batches to increase your productivity.

Photomator: Photo Denoiser With Powerful Color Adjustment Features

Photomator is a free photo editor for iPad, iPhone, and Mac users. It’s a user-friendly image editing tool with fantastic color adjustment features, including a powerful image denoiser that can swiftly and effectively remove noise from photos using artificial intelligence.

In addition, Photomator supports more than 650 RAW image formats and allows for nondestructive photo manipulation using advanced AI algorithms.

DxO PureRAW 2: Image Denoiser With Advanced Photo Enhancements

DxO PureRAW 2 is an intuitive denoising software tool with unprecedented noise reduction and photo enhancement capabilities. Thanks to its advanced AI features, the tool can automatically detect and completely remove the noise from digital pictures.

DxO PureRAW 2 also comes with a power Lightroom plugin you can tap into to enhance the quality of your images in a breeze.

Conclusion

The key to capturing perfect photos is finding a balance between image sharpness, detail, and noise reduction. Excessive noise reduction settings may lead to a significant loss of details in your images, giving them a less vibrant and unprofessional appeal.

Thankfully, you can tap into multiple techniques to denoise your images while shooting. In addition, you can choose from various advanced software tools with noise reduction features to effectively remove grain from multiple photos with a few clicks.