Eliminating noise/grainy pictures

dandantheadminman · Eliminating noise/grainy pictures

You may find that especially when using a high ISO, or when you beef up the color saturation in your skies or whatever you get a v. grainy picture, or grainy in place. Like this picture (look at teh sky, especially the top left).

However, I found a way to fix this.

First, select the area to want to fix, in this case, I'll choose the sky, i used the rectangle selection tool to do this. Then go to filters/noise/median. and choose the number of pixels as a parameter. the more pixels to use with this filter more it merges all the colors together, eliminating the noise (grainy effect). For this picture I choose the max (100) as I wanted a real smooth sky.

p.s. if you use this effect is get rid of all kinds of sharpness so don't use on places you want to remain sharp (why i only did it on the sky).

here's the final result.

hope this helps.

duncan_g

Thanks for that. Good help, the only problem i notice with your edited pic is that it looks a bit un-natural in the sky now. Kind of abit too smooth, but ill just use a lower pixel level.

farm boy

what do you use to edit your photos i have just been given adobe photoshop elements 4.0 and im absolutely clueless as to how to use it

duncan_g

I use elements too, i think trail_builder uses photoshop CS2 which lets you do much more.
But elemts is great IMO, fine for simple editing like that. ^^^^^

dandantheadminman

yes I have both, and use cs2 most of the time, but find elements better useability.

elements does most of things needed, just lacks the advanced features, and advanced custmizability cs2 has.

duncan_g

I have this problem...
I went biking today and made myself take pics. I got some good ones but sadly there grainy. I tried your method trail_builder, but that only works for one colour things, i need to do it for th wholw pic, sadly. Is there any programs i can get to fix this?

dandantheadminman

as far as im aware, you can only do a good job (therefore no loss of sharpness) with blocks of color

duncan_g

Awhh damn!