I thought instead of trying to squeeze all of the things I love about CS5 into one post I would instead break it up over a few days. There are a lot of great things in this latest version as I’m sure you have heard and it’s hard to say what is the best thing. I thought today I would start with a feature that will have some of the greatest impact for photographers in general and that’s the new Noise Reduction built into Camera Raw 6.
I’m sure that everyone is geeking out about Content Aware Fill and HDRPro, and I will most defintiely get to them but let’s face it, unless you are Trey Ratcliff, you probably aren’t shooting HDR all the time. Noise reduction however is something that all photographers really need. Even though many of today’s digital cameras have amazing low-light capabilities, noise is something that will still be a factor, especially if you are shooting high ISO’s or long exposures.
So how good is the new noise reduction? Good enough that I probably won’t need to ever use a plug-in to get rid of it again. The thing is that, unlike most plug-ins that are applying noise reduction to an already processed image, the noise reduction in CS5 is applied directly to your RAW image so it has more information to work with when eliminating those problem pixels.
Here’s a quick run through on how it works. First thing you need to do is open your image using Camera Raw. This is where you will find the Noise Reduction sliders, hiding in the Detail panel.
(Make sure you click the images to see them larger)
The first thing I like to do is zoom in to 100% and then adjust my image sharpening by using the Amount slider and then using the Masking slider to apply the sharpening to just the edges.
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