Let’s De-Noise a Noisy Photo

Rohinton Mehta

What exactly is ‘noise’?

Noise or digital noise as we often call it, is a type of distortion that looks similar to what ‘grain’ was/is with films. There are several types of noise, but to keep things simple, we shall mention only ‘luminance’ (brightness) noise and ‘chroma’(colour) noise.

Our photos can be noisy due to several reasons. Some reasons are:

1. Using high ISO sensitivity

2. Underexposing the photos and then trying to get detail in dark areas by ‘opening up’ the brightness in an image editing program

3. Using a warm/hot imaging sensor (such as while using the camera in an overly warm environment)