Noise Removal - What's your method?

[DavidEccleston]

I reduce noise less these days. There was a football photographer doing one of the B&H talks a year or two ago... he mentioned that he never applied noise reduction, and nobody has ever complained. Us photographers are the only ones who are so picky about noise.

I still do NR, but I no longer try to remove all clearly visible noise, which makes things much simpler for us crop-body shooters. I pretty much just increase the luma noise slider it Lightroom to something appropriate for the ISO. A ISO 6400 shot starts needing a bit of a boost to the default chroma value too (on 7D2... 7D needed chroma slider earlier).

When I'm going for more NR, which is pretty rare, then after doing noise reduction in LR or ACR, I'll shrink in Photoshop, and do a noise reduction filter after that. Shrinking already minimizes the noise, which helps the NR filter. Running the NR filter on full sizes images tends to do a whole lot of nothing. The NR filter appears to also add a sharpening effect to the image. If the details (like eyes) aren't perfectly sharp after that, then I'll do an unsharp mask.

[jamsus]

I reduce noise less these days. There was a football photographer doing one of the B&H talks a year or two ago... he mentioned that he never applied noise reduction, and nobody has ever complained. Us photographers are the only ones who are so picky about noise.

I still do NR, but I no longer try to remove all clearly visible noise, which makes things much simpler for us crop-body shooters. I pretty much just increase the luma noise slider it Lightroom to something appropriate for the ISO. A ISO 6400 shot starts needing a bit of a boost to the default chroma value too (on 7D2... 7D needed chroma slider earlier).

When I'm going for more NR, which is pretty rare, then after doing noise reduction in LR or ACR, I'll shrink in Photoshop, and do a noise reduction filter after that. Shrinking already minimizes the noise, which helps the NR filter. Running the NR filter on full sizes images tends to do a whole lot of nothing. The NR filter appears to also add a sharpening effect to the image. If the details (like eyes) aren't perfectly sharp after that, then I'll do an unsharp mask.

Pretty same, i'm spending really a lot less time reducing the noise!

Pixel-peeping is the evil !

Maybe some of that is useful when you print a big picture... but before that, just let it flows