How to heal noise in Adobe Photoshop – N-Photo 155 video tutorial

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Noise in photographs 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 Adobe Photoshop CC – and some of the approaches 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 the sharpening process, 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. 

Download the project file(s) to your Downloads folder

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James Paterson

The lead technique writer on Digital Camera MagazinePhotoPlus: The Canon Magazine and N-Photo: The Nikon Magazine, James is a fantastic general practice photographer with an enviable array of skills across every genre of photography. 

Whether it's flash photography techniques like stroboscopic portraits, astrophotography projects like photographing the Northern Lights, or turning sound into art by making paint dance on a set of speakers, James' tutorials and projects are as creative as they are enjoyable. 

He's also a wizard at the dark arts of Photoshop, Lightroom and Affinity Photo, and is capable of some genuine black magic in the digital darkroom, making him one of the leading authorities on photo editing software and techniques.