Reduce Noise?

If you shot in RAW format, your absolute best results come from reducing noise while the image is in Camera Raw (while it’s still an actual RAW image, not applying it later as a filter to the 8-bit or 16-bit regular Photoshop image). So, click on the Detail icon (it’s the third one from the left) under the histogram. In the Noise Reduction section, there are sliders to get rid of the two types of noise: luminance noise (the spots and specks themselves) and color noise (the red, green, and blue specks). The goal is to use as little of an amount of these as possible because noise reduction does its thing by slightly (or majorly) blurring your image to hide the noise. So, zoom in a bit, so you can see the noise, then drag the Luminance or Color slider to the right until the noise is reduced to an amount that lets you sleep at night (knowing full well that the only people in the world that actually care about noise on any level are other photographers). If, after increasing the amount of luminance or color noise reduction, you start to lose detail or contrast in your image, then you can drag the Detail or Contrast slider to the right to help bring some of those back. But, if you find yourself using the Detail or Contrast slider, know that you probably dragged the Luminance or Color slider too far in the first place. Just sayin.’ Also, if the noise is just in one area, try this: Get the Adjustment Brush (K), click twice on the + (plus sign) button to the right of the Noise Reduction slider (to set it to +50 and reset all the other sliders to 0), and then paint over just that area. That way, you don’t slightly blur your entire image to fix a problem in just one area (see Chapter 4 for more on this).