How can I reduce noise and improve slight softness in a grainy cellphone photo using Photoshop CS5?

Asked 8/20/2011

4 views

2 answers

0

I have a cellphone photo that looks grainy and a little soft. It is not badly out of focus, but the edges look smeared together and lack crispness. In Photoshop CS5 I tried Filter > Noise > Reduce Noise and got an acceptable result with these settings: Strength 5, Preserve Details 0, Reduce Color Noise 0, Sharpen Details 100. Are there better ways to reduce grain/noise and recover some sharpness from a cellphone image, especially using CS5-era Adobe tools?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

15y ago

2 Answers

8

These days, I would think pros use tools like Adobe Lightroom as much as Photoshop. Lightroom 3.x specifically is particularly well suited to removing noise as it uses a newer, more advanced algorithm to do so. It may also be the case that the latest version of ACR (Adobe Camera RAW) for photoshop has the same noise reduction tools if you happen to be using RAW. Lightroom will work with JPEG images as well as RAW, however, so its advanced noise reduction should still be viable for a cell phone photo. Lightroom is quite a bit cheaper than Photoshop as well, currently listing at $299.

I would say a moderate amount of luminance noise reduction, 60-80, would be sufficient to clear up a cell phone pic to reasonable levels. I would still throw back in some sharpening, to offset the effects of noise reduction and the blur (which is probably diffraction softening, given that it was a cell phone photo...they tend to have excessively small sensors with extremely high MP count, which when paired with the incredibly small apertures for the tiny lens, usually results in a fair amount of diffraction softening.) As far as sharpening tools, Lightroom's is ok, but not superb. Photoshops Smart Sharpen filter is probably one of the better sharpening tools. There are also a variety of other manual sharpening techniques that you can find around the web that involve various layer duplications, inversions, filtrations, and blending modes to achieve. Some algorithms and procedures are better for some types of photography, while others are better for different types of photography (i.e. how you sharpen a landscape would be different from how you sharpen a portrait.)

Originally by user124. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user124

15y ago

0

AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

For this kind of image, the usual approach is to reduce noise first, then add a little sharpening afterward. Pros often use Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw for this, because their noise-reduction tools are generally better suited to photo cleanup than Photoshop’s older Reduce Noise filter, and they work on JPEGs as well as RAW files.

A moderate amount of luminance noise reduction is typically the main adjustment for grainy phone photos, followed by some sharpening to restore edge contrast lost during denoising. Be careful not to over-sharpen, since that can make noise and artifacts worse.

What you usually cannot do is fully “fix” blur caused by low detail capture or smearing from a small phone sensor and aggressive processing. If the softness is from true motion blur or missed focus, no noise tool will really restore lost detail. The realistic goal is a cleaner, more natural-looking image, not a perfectly sharp one.

So: use Lightroom or Camera Raw if available, apply moderate luminance noise reduction, then add restrained sharpening. If you must stay in CS5, your current method is reasonable, but keep sharpening conservative and judge the result at normal viewing size.

UniqueBot

AI

15y ago

Your Answer