How to remove noise in Photoshop? Remove noise from your photos with this tutorial.
On many occasions when we are taking photos and having incredible moments, or we are capturing a beautiful landscape, we find that the photo is captured with a lot of noise. This is a phenomenon that occurs in digital photographs in low light.
Of course, and because we didn't want to lose that photograph, we took it just like that. The most important thing to mention is that these photos can be retouched and noise removed almost entirely.
The objective of this tutorial is to take advantage of the use of layers in Photoshop to have those photos in their best splendor and save them on our computer.
What is Noise?
Before we start, let's briefly talk about what noise is. Noise is that phenomenon that happens to your photo when you capture it in low light. The devices are forced to raise the ISO due to the lack of light, and this causes dead pixels, which have no color, or look different than they should.
If you take a photograph at night with a lower quality camera, you will notice that this phenomenon that we call noise will become more present.
Remove noise using Photoshop
What we will do is basically use two layers, one that removes the noise and another that will give you sharpness, and in a short time our photo will be fixed.
- Open Photoshop with the photograph in question and we will duplicate the main layer. A soft blur will be applied to this new layer with which we can reduce the noise it has.
- To bring back the detail of our photo we will create a luminance layer mask. To do this go to the channel panel and press Ctrl + left click on the RGB channel to load the highlight selection. When I load the selection, we go to the duplicate layer and add a layer mask.
- We only have to add a filter to find edges in the mask and contrast these edges by adjusting levels or curves. What this will do is that the blur does not affect the detail areas of our photograph, and we have removed the noise.
- To give sharpness we are going to duplicate the layer in which the blur was added previously, we will work on the layer mask. First we invert this mask by pressing Ctrl + I. In this way we are hiding the blur in the entire photo except in the details.
- Next we apply an unsharp mask filter.
Having applied these changes to our photograph we will quickly notice that the noise has successfully gone away.
Different methods to remove noise in Photoshop
When we have photographs with digital noise and we want to eliminate it with Photoshop, we can use Lightroom's noise reduction engine, through Adobe Camera Raw.
Another way you can reduce noise is by using an advanced filter in Photoshop, or by using external plugins. Photoshop allows advanced options to remove digital noise, let's see what those options are:
Adobe Camera Raw
This is the same option you have in Lightroom to remove noise, these programs share the same algorithm. You will be able to noise through the luminance adjustments, and the slider adjustments, and color softness.
Photoshop noise reduction filter
It is an anti-noise filter that helps reduce noise, works in a similar way to camera raw and works through RGB channels. From this advanced module of this filter we will be able to remove the noise in a localized way, adjusting the density and preserving the details.
Plugins and extensions to reduce noise in Photoshop
This is all the third party plugins that allow you to remove noise using Photoshop. Among which stand out: Luminar, Noiseware, Dfine 2, Noise ninja.
Tips for successful noise reduction
When an image has background noise as you apply blur, brightness, contrast, and color adjustments, you will often notice that noise becomes more noticeable, especially in areas such as shadows.
Ideally, you should apply a moderate reduction at the beginning of your workflow, and at the end of the whole process you notice that the noise is still present. Spend an anti-noise lightly and more specifically on the affected areas.
Advanced techniques to remove noise in Photoshop
Photoshop allows the use of advanced techniques to remove noise compared to other editing programs. We show you how:
The technique "blending” or merged is about taking various shots by varying parameters in the camera to later merge the images in Photoshop. In order that we stay with the areas that interest us.
To carry out this technique we will need to make a exposure bracketingie merging multiple shots at different shutter speeds. In this way we will obtain the highest possible quality in the final image.
- Capture to avoid noise in the general part of the image. 20 sec, f/2.8, ISO 2500
- Capture to freeze the movement of the Aurora Borealis. 1,6 sec, f/2.8, ISO 5000
Use the image with more noise as a base, then we mask the whole part with black to get a clean image of noise.
Smart Object Stacking
This is another very effective technique to remove noise in Photoshop. The process is about capturing multiple shots while keeping everything constant: composition, parameters, and so on. In order to stack them through the median mode and thus eliminate noise.
Noise always appears randomly, this process will analyze the non-noise parts of the image to merge them together for a cleaner image.
Conclusion
We hope that this article has been useful to you, leave in the comments if this tutorial has worked for you and you have learned how to how to remove noise in photoshop There are many more options to remove noise, you just have to research them and practice using this wonderful program.