When you take pictures in a dark place with a high ISO setting - like you are pretty much forced to do to take pictures on most Disney rides - you are going to end up with noise in your pictures. At smaller sizes this isn’t such a big deal, but if you want to view them larger or print them out, noise can become a pretty large issue. Fortunately, there is software designed to take care of this issue that does a really great job of smoothing out the noise without you loosing a lot of detail.
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The images above are closeup shots of the skeletons hat from the large image up top. If you look at the image on the left, you can see how there is a lot of noise present in both the green bandanna and the background. The image on the right has been run through a noise reduction Photoshop plugin called Noise Ninja, and as you can see a lot of the noise has been smoothed out, without a lot of detail being lost. This works great not only on ride shots, but also any shot where you have a lot of one color, like a very blue sky. I would say on average, I probably do noise reduction on probably 75% of all photos I shoot.
As I mentioned above, the software I use for this is called Noise Ninja (available at http://www.picturecode.com/). They have versions for home users as cheap as $34.95, but I like the pro bundle pack at $79.95, as it allows you to process all the images in a directory automatically, which is great for when I’ve taken hundreds of shots at the park. There are also many other software packages that do the same thing, including:
- Neat Image - Starting at $29.90 (http://www.neatimage.com/)
- Dfine 2.0 - $99.95 (http://www.niksoftware.com/dfine/usa/entry.php)
- Built in noise reduction in Photoshop and Lightroom (and quite possibly Photoshop Elements)
I use Noise Ninja because for me it’s the least complicated and I get great results, but a lot of people are very happy with the software above, and there are many more applications available, just do a Google search for “noise reduction software”. Regardless of how you do it, your images are guaranteed to look better.
