Removing Digital Noise
This blog post is for all photographers whose heart rate doubles any time they need to photograph inside a dark, poorly lit hotel/barn/miscellaneous dark room.
What is digital noise?
If the beautiful grain from analog photographs had an evil twin, it would be digital noise. Digital noise in a photograph manifests as random, often colored, pixels that bring the overall quality of the image down. Noise flattens an image and distorts the quality of the histogram, making it difficult to see details in the shadows.
Where does Digital Noise Come From?
Digital noise comes from underexposing a photograph. Cameras with small sensors are the most susceptible to noise because they can’t handle low-light situations very well.
How do to avoid noise when shooting
Understanding your camera’s limitations is the best way to avoid noise and photograph confidently in low-light scenarios. The best way to do this is to try it out yourself in a low-stress environment. Pick the room in your house with the least amount of natural light and take test photos at varying ISOs. Import those photos to Lightroom and edit them as if they were for a client. Take note of when you decide the amount of digital noise become unacceptable to you, and remember there’s no right answer! Some photographers really lean into their digital noise and to that I say, godspeed.
If you’re unhappy with how much noise you’re currently noticing in your images, you can either upgrade your camera or start using on/off camera flash.
How to fix noise in Lightroom
There are some tricks to minimize the obviousness of digital noise, but it’s impossible to remove completely. Working in Lightroom’s Develop module, the Detail panel holds all the tools to help with noise! The color slider is my favorite slider to ease the screaming of color-heavy noise, see examples below.
Be very gentle with the Luminance slider, as it is a global adjustment and will soften the entire photograph.
The color slider helps desaturate the colors in digital noise
Color Slider at 0
Color Slider at 100
