A friend of mine sent me this tip. I tried it on a couple of images and it worked pretty good. I thought I would share with anyone else who wanted to try this.

L.


Removing Noise In Digital Camera Image
If you shoot images with a digital camera, you can almost bet that the image (when opened in Photoshop) will have some unwanted noise. Most of this noise appears only within the Blue channel, and knowing that, you can go to the Blue channel and add a slight blur to just that channel. This helps get rid of the noise and leaves the detail in the other channels untouched. Here's how:

1. Open your digital camera image in Photoshop.

2. Go to the Channels palette and click on the Blue channel to make it active.

3. Go under the Filter menu, under Blur, and choose Gaussian Blur. When the Gaussian Blur dialog appears, add a slight bit of blur (we can't give you a specific value; you'll have to experiment, but start at 0.5 and move slowly upward using the Up Arrow key on your keyboard).

4. When the noise has pretty much disappears, click on the RGB composite channel and continue with your regular image correction.

Thanks for the tip Linda! Will have to give it a try sometime!

thanks for the tip. blurring a channel!!! that goes against all my imaging teachings, the struggle within me!

for those of you who often shoot at high ISO's, Noise Ninja, a third party plugin is one of the best in the business!

-garrett

Lol... sad thing is, all of our digital cameras blur all of our images right off the bat... interestingly sad. And it's done on purpose too... hmm

I know a professional photographer who made Blue channel his primary method for buying a camera. Apparently, for whatever reason, the blue channel is always the worst with noise -- which is why blurring that channel "fixes" it.

Anyone else ever hear that before??

Thanks for the tip, Linda. I'm going to give it a try this weekend.

Floyd

Tim, can you clairify what you meant? I'm interested in why they would do it "on purpose."

The blurring of a channel is an interesting idea....I'll try it out!

Ok I tried this, and when you select the blue channel, it won't let you use any filters on the channel... it will let you duplicate the blue channel and then use the blur on the duplicate, but you can't delete the old blue channel... any thoughts on this? I probably need to flatten the image, but I don't want to lose my layers.... ??

Hey Chris,

The reason for this is sorta two fold, possibly even more. The filter (there are several filters placed over a ccd/cmos chip) is often called the "anti-moire" filter. This filter does what it's name implies, it removes moire patterns from you photographs that could appear due to the pattern of the pixels on the censor, and say the patter of a shirt someone is wearing. The second purpose of this filter is to make sure you don't lose small details, for instance, a hair on someone's head, if it was running diagonally, might seem to "disappear" between a few pixels and therefore seem jagged or dotted. This filter blurs the image so it is spread out over more pixels in the censor so that there is no missing information.

I guess that would be the "simple" explination.

Tim you are super smart, where did you go to school?????