Is there a photofix?

July 10, 2007 1:57 PM

Can I save my photos? A tale of ISO confusion within.

I recently took a couple of hundred photos on a foreign trip. Unfortunately, due to my own idiocy, I set my camera to a manual ISO 400 setting the night before and then left it on, shooting continuously the next (bright sunny) day. Obviously all the in-camera thumbnails looked fine, but on transferring to my PC I find that they're horribly, horribly noisy.

What can I do? I have Photoshop Elements 4.0, if that helps. The camera was set to automatic in every other respect, and the images are at a native 2816 x 2112 resolution. If it helps, I'm only really hoping to use them at 800 x 600. A sample image can be found here. (2.4mb).

posted by jonathanbell to computers & internet (14 comments total)

Personally, I've had good luck in the past with Neat Image for cleaning up noise in digital photos. Full disclosure: I don't use NI these days, as I find that Capture One DSLR (which I use to process my raw files, as I don't shoot jpg) does a good enough job for me nowadays. But I used to use it religiously.

However, honestly, if you are only going to use these at 800x600, a lot of the noise is going to basically average out when you downsample. At worst it's going to leave you with slightly hazy photos, which you can easily fix with techniques like Local Contrast Enhancement.
posted by tocts at 2:03 PM on July 10, 2007 [1 favorite]

I've had good luck with Noise Ninja for removing high-ISO noise and film grain.
posted by c0nsumer at 2:21 PM on July 10, 2007 [2 favorites]

Your sample looks like a beautiful Monet!!!!

Photoshop Elements has a noise filter. I don't have it to loook at right now, but go through your filters menu and try some noise filters. Also, at small sizes, as said above, you may not see the noise at all.
posted by The Deej at 2:25 PM on July 10, 2007

Yeah, some people pay good money for effects like that. Photo fix software can only go so far... it looks like there's a LOT of data missing from that. Even if you remove the noise, there are going to be pretty big fields that will look blurred or absent of detail, which may actually look worse. You may be better off just making the noise blend in better - taking some of the red noise out of the sky, some of the blue out of the building, etc.

For what its worth, I kind of dig the effect.
posted by devilsbrigade at 2:45 PM on July 10, 2007

Seconding Neat Image. I use it a lot on photos taken inside with no flash.
posted by Umhlangan at 3:16 PM on July 10, 2007

I just ran Noise Ninja on that image.

Here's the results.

I think it's a noticeable improvement, myself.
posted by beaucoupkevin at 3:47 PM on July 10, 2007

Er. Result. Not Results.
posted by beaucoupkevin at 3:49 PM on July 10, 2007

May I ask what camera produced that much noise at ISO 400?
posted by The Bellman at 4:26 PM on July 10, 2007

The Bellman: Leica C-lux 1. It says in the exif tags.

I like noise ninja too. For the photos that you can't recover enough from, try dropping into black & white - the noise will be less pronounced (a lot of what you're seeing is color noise) and what's there will be less gross-looking.
posted by aubilenon at 4:47 PM on July 10, 2007

From the EXIF:

Image input equipment manufacturer: LEICA
Image input equipment model: C-LUX 1

And wow, that's beyond noisy, it's blotchy; doesn't look too bad scaled down though. The Noise Ninja run beaucoupkevin posted looks far worse, imo; it destroys even more detail, noticable even at 704x528.
posted by Freaky at 4:47 PM on July 10, 2007

Maybe the compression was turned up too, in addition to the high iso...
posted by The Deej at 5:14 PM on July 10, 2007

Thanks everyone. Some good suggestions here. I'm going to play with the Local Contrast Enhancement and see what I can do. These little Leicas have notoriously bad ISO performance, as you can see.
posted by jonathanbell at 11:41 PM on July 10, 2007

I shoot at 400 all the time without getting that much noise. I suspect another root cause. Cool picture, by the way.
posted by Area Control at 11:47 AM on July 12, 2007

These are all at 400 with an oldish camera. Small file sizes to be sure, and more noise than I usually like, but you can see it's nothing like the OPs sample. There must be something else going on.
posted by The Deej at 7:44 AM on July 13, 2007