There are also third-party Photoshop plug ins that reduce noise. Many of these do a better job at reducing noise than Photoshop alone. I will briefly cover two of them, Neat Image and Noise Ninja.

I prefer to use Neat Image. It seems to do a pretty good job and it has a lot of options and features.

I have Neat Image Pro+ 5.0 installed as a Photoshop plug in. There are several versions with different prices and features. Some work as a plug in, some work as an independent program.

To access Neat Image Pro+ plug in, I go to the "Filter" menu, slide down to "Neat Image" and then slide over and click "Reduce Noise".



The following dialog box pops up. The best results come from a device noise profile for your specific digital camera or scanner. You can download these off Neat Image's web site or you can create your own. Alternatively, Neat Image can automatically build a "noise profile" by scanning the image. I want to have Neat Image do this, so I click on "Auto Profile".



I get this error message saying "Neat Image cannot find uniform area... Continue building profile?". This is because the program looks for a featureless area with only noise and this image doesn't really have any featureless areas. A featureless image is something like a sky with only noise and no real detail. Sometimes this will happen. I am just going to click on "Yes" and hope the automatically created profile will work ok.

?

The profile has been created. I'll click on the "Noise Filter Settings" tab to continue.