noise reduction

I use a T3i for macro and I have noticed that others who use crop sensors tend to have some noise issues going on in the backgrounds of shots when using higher iso's. This tutorial shows you how to manually remove noise on a per channel basis which is pretty handy and much more effective than slapping on some noise preset and tweaking a few sliders. To be more specific this is and effective way to handle noise at iso 1600 and 3200 when doing natural light macro and still allows you to maintain a pretty good amount of sharpness. Anyways I hope somebody else gets some use out of it. http://planetphotoshop​.com/remove-noise.html Also One thing to point out that this video does not mention is that because you are actually blurring the channels with a filter you can do post sharpening without bringing the noise back which is pretty cool.

Thanks for the link- will have to have a look at this.
Brian v.

GReat, hope it helps brian also makes me wonder what else is possible with manipulation of color channels.

Interesting. I played around with it for a while and can produce very similar results to what I usually get with Topaz denoise, but I seem to actually get MORE control doing it this way. Takes a little longer, but will probably be worth the effort. Thanks so much for sharing!

Very cool tutorial, thanks Wes. If your not familiar with channel masking yet that's another cool thing you can do with channels.

I used that technique for about two years (until I bought Dfine from Nik Software a few months ago). It really works great, better than the regular NR filter in PS.
As to it taking a bit longer, just create some actions. Because you shoot a certain way, you will soon realise that you often use the same numbers on the same channels. So then make actions for them.
I shoot in a way that gives me little noise, and as the green channel is usually very clean, I had two actions for a mild Surface Blur:

-one with red as the noisiest channel, blue as the second channel (less blur), green no blur
-one with blue as the noisiest channel, red as the second channel (less blur), green no blur

If I had an image where the green channel did need some noise reduction I would do that manually.

Anyway, that worked well and did speed up things quite a bit.

Nature Nut wrote in post #14889409
Very cool tutorial, thanks Wes. If your not familiar with channel masking yet that's another cool thing you can do with channels.

Thanks Adam, If I can remember correctly because its been a few months, I think I have tried luminoscity sharpening were you ctrl click the rgb layer and copy/paste the selection to a new layer and then change the selection to a luminoscity layer. Not sure if that is the same thing as channel masking but I will look into it more when I get home from school.

calypsob wrote in post #14900890
Thanks Adam, If I can remember correctly because its been a few months, I think I have tried luminoscity sharpening were you ctrl click the rgb layer and copy/paste the selection to a new layer and then change the selection to a luminoscity layer. Not sure if that is the same thing as channel masking but I will look into it more when I get home from school.

Channel masking is done with one or two of the alpha channels. Here's a video tutorial by Deke McClelland. He combines two channels here, using Calculations, but you can also use just one single channel, that depends on the uniformity of the colours in the image and thus their contrast in the alpha channels. I always start just clicking the individual channels, duplicate the most contrasty channel, reverse it and then increase contrast using levels, dodging and what have you.