Knock Down Noise in Your Photos

Noise in a photograph isn’t always bad. Occasionally, those colored speckles that are most common in the shadows can add a gritty, grainy mood that enhances the image. But usually, you want to get rid of noise.
When you’re trying to fix photographs with a lot of noise, the ideal is to remove that noise without also removing details that make your images look sharp. Many software programs aim to solve this problem, and now there’s a new one: NoiseControl from The Plugin Site.
You can automatically remove noise using NoiseControl’s Auto Sample and Auto Preset. Auto Sample finds a part of the photo without any details; Auto Preset chooses an existing preset based on your camera’s model and the photo’s ISO setting. NoiseControl also gives you several ways to manually tweak any photo’s denoising settings. You can affect shadows, midtones, highlights, and nine color areas.
Once you’ve banished the noise, you can stay in the plug-in and fine-tune sharpening and grain. You can also adjust the image’s saturation.
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NoiseControl is a $50 Photoshop plug-in. At the moment, it’s available only for Windows computers, but The Plugin Site says that a Mac version and an Adobe Lightroom plug-in are in the works.