I’ve always had a thing about grainy pictures. You don’t want to know why. No one I know seems to share this thing and therefore I’ve had to drill “grain is bad, noise is evil” into my head.

This brings us to today’s Photoshop task. A nice lady from Spain sent me a photo taken with a camera phone (two-megapixel Nokia 8600 Luna, if you care). Noise, grain and snow were all present. Yum!

After drooling over the photo for a moment, I knew what I had to do.
Fast forward a few hours and here’s the result:

My fixation wasn’t the only reason I decided to leave some of the graininess intact. Dramatic noise reduction often has the undesired side effect of making photos look like photorealistic drawings. That’s why you should never attempt to remove noise, but reduce it.

Use Detail Comparison for a more particular examination.

I also created a crazed-four-retro-pop-art-panel thingy while brainstorming.

Drink Pepsi,
Buikhu

Photo credit: Rhéa Nielsen <- She’s so pretty I shouldn’t have called her a lady.

P.S. Video noise is always, always unforgivable.