Subtitles of the Movie

The decision to treat your image for excessive noise is once again a function of what you want to do with it and how bad it really is. Sometimes the point of diminishing returns is crossed when making that decision, so let's look at two examples and see what we would want to do with these images. Now, the image on the right is a 3200 ISO image and had some very minor crops to it. A little bit of dead space on the left hand part of the image was trimmed and that's about it. So we have an image that, you know, it's a basketball shot. It's not going to ever be a fine art image. It's never going to be judged for the quality of the image. We're judging it for what it captures; the action. It's a rather humorous shot of two teammates getting tangled up in a game. The image on the left; picture of a cute teenager. You know, just an interesting little shot. The one thing I do want to point out in this image is that her light skin tones show an example of when do you expose an image properly even when you're using the high ISOs, the image can result in a rather acceptable result and you can see here that yes, there is noise, you can see it, but it's not detracting from the image and really kind of is acceptable. So high ISOs in certain applications are not always the kiss of death. Now, there is a way to deal with such noise if you decide you want to do that and there is a debate in the professional ranks as to whether the on-board noise reduction in the upper range DSLRs is better than the standalone software available to reduce noise. Now, my vote is to turn off the noise reduction feature in your camera for several reasons. First, it's just not as good as the standalone software and while it's working, your camera is frozen from use until the algorithms are done processing. This in-camera processing also uses a lot of power and drains your batteries. It's totally unacceptable in high-action sport photography and you should not need any noise reduction in landscape and portrait photography because you're using low ISOs to begin with. Now, let's look at two products you can purchase to use as Photoshop plug-ins to reduce noise. The first one is Neat Image, the one shown here, and the second one is Noise Ninja. Most people use one or the other. I know a lot of people who use Noise Ninja and swear by it. Personally, I use Neat Image for a variety of reasons. They're both priced similarly, so around 75 dollars. They both deal with 16-bit images but I thought that Neat Image really addressed more image issues than Noise Ninja did, so I chose Neat Image. Now, in the next movie we're going to take a look at an actual image and I'll show you how to reduce noise in an image.