Most of the shooting I do is landscapes, wildlife, or architecture, so I'm usually shooting at 100-200 iso and never have to worry about noise in my photos. But, lately I've been photographing my high school's marching band and football team, so I'm using high iso and having trouble removing noise from the photos like these: http://www.pbase.com/msummers/image/85941745/original.jpg http://www.pbase.com/msummers/image/85941740/original.jpg Any suggestions?
Personally I use Noise Ninja. I know there is at least one free one out there, and some of the editing packages include their own as well.
I've used two systems, and both work well and have free versions. Noiseware by Imagenomics is an excellent system, with lots of flexibility and tunability for specific noise situations. The free version is stripped down and can only save in JPG, but is still effective - but the purchase versions (standard and professional versions) are both excellent - including 48bit TIFF saving, leaves EXIF intact, batch processing, learning profiles, and more. Having used Neat Image and Noise Ninja previously, I've actually been pretty happy with Noiseware's results over the other two. The other system I use is Helicon, also available free or pay versions. I like this system for a few reasons - the simplicity and speed when I want a fast removal is great, and it is a great plug-in with my PSP8 system. But also because it has the ability to 'paint' the noise reduction with a brush to specific parts of the photo as needed. And it also comes with an excellent Abberation/Purple Fringe removal tool, red-eye removal tool, and an HDR merge tool built in. I have the pay version, with free upgrades for life as new versions come out...and probably use Helicon more overall than Nosieware just because of the simplicity and selective painting of noise reduction. When I need advanced help for very heavy noise, especially the ugly chroma noise, I go to Noiseware which seems a bit more effective for the heavy stuff.
