What is noise?

There are many different types of noise. The most visible noise is the random variation of brightness or colour information in images. These often appear as salt and pepper specks in the shadows or as bands of shadows. Some degree of electronic noise is present in any electronic device that transmits or receives a signal. When you sharpen an image, it also sharpens the noise significantly degrading your image quality.

The other most common issue is pixelation noise and jpeg artifacts. This is due to insufficient image information/resolution for the required output. An example is cropping in tight and zooming in. It is also due to down-sampling an image or excessive editing.

Noise reduction

The process of noise reduction smooths the dots of colour and tone in your image, reducing sharpness. The goal is to reduce noise and retain as much sharpness as you can in the image.

Noise reduction trick inside Snapseed

Snapseed does not have a noise reduction tool. However, understanding the process of noise reduction, you can replicate it using the existing Details tool. We need to smooth the image while retaining as much sharpness as we can.

Locate and use the Details tool?

Noise reduction inside Adobe Lightroom

One of the great advantages of using the Sharpening tool inside Lightroom is the Masking option. You can avoid enhancing the details in the flat, smoother and darker areas of the image where the noise and artifacts like to hang out! Also within the Details section are two noise reduction tools - Noise Reduction (luminance noise) and Colour Noise Reduction.

Colour noise reduction

My editing process typically involves colour noise first. You can see this when the blotchiness has random colour. A more technical term is mottling artifacts.

Noise reduction

Now you have three sliders to balance! You will need to zoom in to see the effect of your adjustments then zoom back out again to make sure it still has a sense of realism. The Contrast slider protects the contrast in the edges of the objects in the photo. Details is adjusted to bring back details lost when adjusting the Noise Reduction slider. Again, it is a balancing act.

This video lesson is extracted from the Blurry to Tack-Sharp Photos: 4-Step System. More details on the system can be found here

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- Mike

Read the full article at https://www.smartphonephotographytraining.com/editing/reduce-image-noise