Photoshop Secrets 18: Perfect Noise Removal While Keeping Beautiful Details

This Photoshop tutorial will teach you a little known method for reducing noise in your images while keeping fine details

[RobinLeowGooglePlus]

Thank you for your sharing. And the fact that you didnt force to buy your Raya-Pro made me respect you more. Good job.

[cosawanty]

A short and simple, but excellent tip.
I only ever used mean stacking to remove people from scenes.
Thanks for that.

[rickb]

On older PS versions without the stacking mode, you can align the images and the lower the opacity of each layer as you go up through the exposures, bottom at 100%, then 50% (1/2), 33% (1/3), 25% (/4), etc...

[RobertBergan]

Thanks. Great, straight forward useful video with no waffling or stupid music.

[Redzo]

A really useful and great tip. Big thanks and regards from Stockholm, Sweden Ryan :)

[TonyTumminello]

Have you tested this against Median stacking and found Mean to still be superior? An advantage of using Median is that it effectively ignores large outlier values from the random noise while Mean will count them when it performs the average.

[YannickSoler]

Very nice tutorial! By the way, it uses the same technique as the "image averaging noise", you just have to stack your layers and reduce opacity to reduce noise without sacrifying details. But it's much quicker, so thank you for the tip!

[whou]

Cool trick. I will have to remember this next time I am doing a long exposure of fixed objects.

[raindropsneverfall]

Never seen this method before! Very cool!

[eworld]

Excellent tutorial. Love these quick tips!

[MegaRotors]

If you really want to get more detail in those pictures, then you can zoom in and take multiple smaller photos and stitch them together in MS ICE after you do this to each of them.

[jameslane]

Wow! I was wondering if it would work for 360 photos and Windows version of Photoshop.

[marklinang]

Hi Jimmy! I've had more luck with using Median instead of Mean. Have you tried? If so, would you mind sharing your verdict?

Cheers mate!

[JohnBurgess]

Hi Jimmy, I watched a tutorial the other day on how to remove noise using a near exact method to what you're describing here. The only difference was that after converting the layers to a smart object, he used the median stack mode.
Do you know of the difference between the mean and median stack modes?
Thanks in advance,
John

[BillGong]

This was genius. Thank you for sharing.

[franmol]

wow! that's extraordinary. thank s Jimmy.

[georgebrandon]

This is exactly how most astro-photographers remove noise. Take more photos (like 11), the effects of this is even better. Ever wonder how you see crystal clear moon photos as well as MilkyWay photos with no noise? This is how it's done.

[darikdatta]

You would have to have the camera fixed to get the multiple identical exposures you need to do this.

If the camera is fixed, just turn down the ISO and take a long exposure. You'll get better results with less fuss.

[LunarDelta]

This technique is a very powerful one indeed, especially when you have an older camera like mine. (And a micro 4/3 camera to boot; I love this thing to death but god almighty is it noisy). I used it *all the time* until I purchased DxO Optics Pro 11. The PRIME noise reduction is so good it's almost witchcraft. The raw conversion in general is sharper and cleaner than Camera Raw, too.

[GeoffMoorePhotography]

Hello Jimmy, thank you for the video, do you do the noise reduction before any post process? Also, I'm assuming the above works with multiple multiple bracketed exposures? Thinking I'd like to try this technique then take noise improved images into Raya Pro for blending.