Ugh! Dang newbie mistakes! - or - How to clean up ISO noise?

[jgrover]

> So we went to a Seattle Mariners game today and shot around ~150 pictures, practicing my shot timing and capturing action (from the nose bleeds). After getting home, I noticed all of my shots are grainy as heck. I left ISO set at 1600 from a previous usage. >

Now I'm not really trying to salvage these shots, I got my practice in, but it lead me to wonder about how to clean up unwanted noise. I tried the tool in RawShooter essentials 2006, but didn't have much luck. I don't have Photoshop, so plug-ins are no help. Any free utilities out there to help?


Below is a 100% crop. (yes... the lens is bad, it's an old 70 - 200 JC Penney special that was a hand me down)

- Jason

[jgrover]

Oh - and I saw someone with a BIG ole lens walking around (Canon EF 400mm f/2.8L?) Both of my kids were like "WHOA! You NEED that one, Dad!"


Yes kids... I NEED that...

[dvdowns]

Just for interest , though I don't do much noise controllling , I bought Photoshop elements 4.0 and it is very powerful for the price and includes noise reduction " despecle" and the likes and it was only NZ$199 [ about US$140 ] , for my needs it does everything including RAW files for my Nikon .

[Alter_ego]

Admittedly I'm using photoshop, but I did a noise reduction 'median 1%' and then usm 400% radius .2.
There is an improvement but it'll never be perfect. I don't know if you have the same filters with your software, but you may have something like it.

[Cato]

Hello I use a program called NeatImage, www.neatimage.com. Download it and see if you like it. Nontheless, I've seen several pictures that turn out pretty 'neat' with grain in it Maybe you're going at this the wrong way. Instead of trying to clean up the 'mistake', try to exaggerate it? Find a pretty cool picture, add more grain to it. How does that turn out? Maybe change some colors too? I'm just thinking out loud.

[Alter_ego]

How about the old sepia toned look.

[Cato]

Cool

[jgrover]

That's pretty cool...

I want to buy Photoshop CS once my wife is back in school to get the student pricing, so in the interim I dont want to drop a ton of money on other programs.

I like the sepia toned look with the grain... looks kind of old!

[Liza]

The freeware version of Neat Image isn't too bad, but be advised that it removes the exif data from your images. The best way to avoid noise, in my experience, is to expose properly when you take the picture. Don't underexpose to get a higher shutter, because you'll introduce noise. I shoot at ISO 1600 for sports much of the time and have very little problem with it.

[jgrover]

Neat image seems pretty cool - but because there are a lot of other speckled textures (grass, dirt, etc...) they end up getting washed out as well leaving a blurry image that looks like there was vasaline on the lens.

The D70 is pretty noisy at high ISO's - I would have likely shot at 200 with all of the sun we had yesterday (if I hadnt totally spaced on the ISO thing...)

[cyclohexane]

I've been experimenting with selectively applying gaussian blur to the A and B channels after converting the image to Lab color to get rid of nasty color noise.* I seem to remember Thom Hogan or someone else saying that this was one way to do it without special software.* Nikon Capture has a utility that works similarly to this process, I think, but I haven't used the program.* If you apply too much, you get color-smearing, but this does seem to kill off most of the color noise at the expense of saturation. Your image doesn't really seem to have a lot of color noise, and I wasn't really making a noticeable improvement when I tried working on your sample. Hopefully someone who gets this stuff better can help you more, LOL

Also, try printing the image as an 8 x 10 or whatever your regular usage size is.* Is the noise really that noticeable?* The D2H is noisier than the D70- in fact, it's considered one of Nikon's noisiest cameras; yet even at ISO 1600, it looks fine when printed.* I've got some rather large images in our yearbook shot at ISO 1600 which look just fine to most eyes.

[scoundrel1728]

I also have Neat Image. There isn't really enough featureless area in the crop you have to "train" the noise filter properly, so I can't rework your image to show you, but I have found the software useful. Neat Image is a stand-alone piece of software unless you get one of the + versions (Home+ or Pro+) which also has a Photoshop-compatible plug-in. You don't need Photoshop to use the plug-in version; I have it the plug-in version installed on Corel Photo-Paint 12, Paint Shop Pro 9, and Irfanview.

I haven't tried Neat Image on any of my Canon 350D images, but here are some demo shots I have posted on Webshots. The shots were taken with my Nikon Coolpix 995.

ISO 400:


ISO 400 after denoising:


ISO 100:


It should be noticed that the vertical scratch on the sign toward the left of the image has lost some of its intermittent structure in the denoised ISO 400 shot that is visible at ISO 100. You can expect to lose some detail in low-contrast areas of your image along with the noise.

If you don't mind the graininess of the image but dislike the chroma noise, Neat Image allows you to remove noise from the chroma (Cr and Cb) channels only and to turn off the noise reduction in the brightness (Y) channel. Even the default setting deliberately leaves a little noise in the Y channel to keep the image from having too much of a "plastic" look.

[Aussiejoe]

Hi,

I find Picture Cooler works well, it is a freeware Noise reduction program and the latest version has a plug-in for PS, I haven't played around with it to find out how it works yet.

I use CS2 and the noise reduction filter leaves a lot to be desired, I've used Neat Image and Noiseware but have found Picture Cooler works best for me.

* *http://denoiser.shorturl.com/

[rootrider]

I'd say it's more your lens than the camera that's hurting your shot. I took this with the D70 and the 18-70 (iirc... might have been the 70-210 f/4-5.6) at 1600 ISO. I also forgot that I had turned the ISO up from the previous day's shooting. Yes, Neat Image makes the images overly smooth (I usually just do "remove half of the noise"), but a quick Unsharp Mask helps bring back the sharpness to something more normal.

D70, ISO 1600, Neat Image ('default' image cleaning), Unsharp mask:


I took a bunch of photos that day all with the same 'problem' and solutions (see gallery for a larger version of the above image as well):
http://www.fakelag.net/gallery/v/nor...ghlightId=4574

I've actually been rather impressed with the high ISO performance of the D70 since I was expecting it to be unusable as so many people suggest online. In actuality the noise that exists is nice and clean and easily fixable. My cleaned up ISO 1600 images look only slightly 'worse' than my untouched ISO 200 images. It's one more step.. but not a real problem.

Good luck!

[jgrover]

Well as it turns out, I have anther shot this Friday. I am headed to the game again and this time, I'll be sure to check ALL my settings . I plan on taking some picture where my 18 - 70 and 70 - 200 overlap to see lens quality differences.

I suspect they'll be drastic differences between lenses

[DigitalPhotography]

If you have Adobe PS or Element I would recommend Dfine from Nik Sofware Inc. I think I paid around $100, but have seen it for less on some of the auction/listing sites.