In this tutorial, I am going to go through various methods to reduce noise with Adobe Photoshop. I'll explore Photoshop's built in tools that can be used to reduce noise as well as some third party noise reduction plug ins, Neat Image and Noise Ninja. Finally, I will show you a technique to selectively apply the noise reduction to different parts of the image, so you can get rid of the noise where you need to and preserve the details where you need to too.

First, I'm going to cover the "Reduce Noise" filter, which is new in Photoshop CS2.

I'll begin with the subject of my noise reduction efforts, a noisy image.



You can't see the noise in the image zoomed out like this. I'll double-click on the "Zoom" tool, it looks like a magnifying glass, to zoom in to 100%.



At 100% zoom level, the actual size of the image, you can see how noisy this image is.