Reducing Noise in PS

I would appreciate some tips to reduce noise in people shots taken in low light at high ISO. Have tried Neat Image but the skin looks unnaturally smooth.

What processing software (besides Neat Image) do you have/are using?

It depends on what you're using the photos for. If you're displaying them on the internet, then just downsizing the photos is remarkably good for removing noise.

If you need to use noise reduction then edge masking is the way ahead. This will prevent edges being blurred and smoothed by the noise reduction.

tonylong wrote in post #8984709
What processing software (besides Neat Image) do you have/are using?

Using Photoshop CS3 and want to print the images A5

For A5 I wouldn't bother with any NR apart from some chroma NR in the Raw converter for shots up to and including ISO 3200 on my Mk3 or ISO 1600 on a 1D2...

As René suggests, an image printed at A5 will be quite compressed which will make normal noise virtually unseeable. If you will be printing a close crop of an underexposed image with either high ISO amplification or boosting of shadows in software, well, that's another matter -- how much NR you apply will depend on the image.

Noise removal programs like Neat Image should have a plug-in for Photoshop available so that you can use them in the Photoshop environment and use PS layers and masks and apply a lower opacity to the NR when needed and mask out areas you don't want to apply NR to.