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 If you’ve been using a digital camera for a while now, you can probably recognize noise (a.k.a. “digital grain”)—those colored specks in dark or shadowed areas, or bright specks in brightly colored areas, especially in images of sky. It’s ugly, but it can be fixed quite easily with tools such as nik multimedia’s Dfine 1.0 plug-in (www.nikmultimedia.com; $100 download) for Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.
Technically, there are two types of noise: luminance noise and chrominance noise. Learn to recognize the difference, because software tools reduce noise according to its type. Luminance noise resembles the small, dark spots of film grain. (You remember film, right?) The off-color specks of chrominance noise, the second, and often more troublesome, type, look more like the colored version of the snow you used to see when you dialed your TV to stations without channels (you remember TV dials, right?).
It may seem counterintuitive, but the first step to reducing noise is to turn off the noise-reduction filter in your camera. Many cameras’ built-in noise-reduction systems can end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater; in an attempt to reduce the specks they blur the image slightly, and in fact reduce detail. You’ll be better off doing the noise reduction yourself after you shoot. The same, by the way, goes for in-camera sharpening and contrast enhancement. It’s always best to leave yourself the opportunity to make these decisions on your own, according to the way you want your image to look.
Another note: remember to save your color and contrast corrections for after you reduce noise.
Dfine provides an almost overwhelming amount of options for noise reduction. Let’s start with the simplest, using the “Quick Fix” mode.
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