The best plugins for Photoshop: how to speed up and optimize work. Filters submenu “Noise” The best Photoshop plugin for removing noise

Photoshop is a trusted image/photo editing tool used by millions of designers, photographers, and other professionals around the world.

A true Photoshop master can do everything from retouching photos to creating stunning animation effects. And, of course, professionals often use Photoshop plugins, which make their work much easier.

20 Best Plugins for Photoshop

If photography is not only a job for you, but also a calling, this article will be useful to you. If you want to popularize your photos and attract new clients, you should definitely follow the latest design trends. In this article, we have described the best Photoshop plugins that will help you create high-quality works in a short time.

Google Nik Collection

• Price: for free

Free access is not the only advantage of this collection of plugins. Let's start with Analog Efex Pro. This tool can turn any photo into a true retro wonder. And with Color Efex Pro, you can effectively work on the color scheme and color correction of the image.

Silver Efex Pro is useful for those who want to create beautiful black and white images. If you want to quickly adjust colors and tones in a photo, the Viveza plugin is more suitable for you. With HDR Efex Pro, you can restore color effects and bring back shadows that disappeared during processing. Sharpener Pro is the best tool for working on the details you want to highlight in a photo.

Fontself

• Price: $49-$79

With Fontself you can create amazing text styles. This plugin is also available in Adobe Illustrator CC. You can purchase a package containing two versions of the plugin at once, or buy each of them separately.

Digimarc

• Price: subscription for a year $59 ( basic version) / $199 (pro version)

If you want to track how your photos are used, this plugin is a must-have for you. Digimarc will help protect your copyright even if original photo has been edited (for example, the format has been changed).

Exposure

• Price:$149-$199 (package)

Exposure is a great plugin for Photoshop that can help you bring your photos to life a little. One of the main advantages of this plugin is the saving feature. With Exposure, you can track all the actions performed on a photo without losing a single version. This Photoshop plugin also contains powerful toning and sharpening features. More experienced users will certainly appreciate the features for vignetting, bokeh, grain, as well as a variety of frames and textures.

Fixel Contrastica 2

• Price: $29.99

Fixel Contrastica is a reliable plugin for photographers who want to work on the contrast of their work. By adjusting Shadows, Midtones and Highlights, you can add visual fidelity to your photos in no time.

Font Explorer X

• Price: €89.00

By choosing FontExplorer, you are choosing a powerful tool for working with fonts. This plugin includes a preview function, allows you to view detailed information about the current font and supports a dark theme. If you need to quickly switch between multiple fonts, use this Photoshop plugin.

Geographic Imager

• Price: from $89 (Geographic Imager basic license) to $1899 (Geographic Imager and MAPublisher package)

This is a great tool for adding geotagging to images. You can mark coordinates and define a coordinate system, which is something you can't do in any other plugin. You can even switch between geodetic and projection coordinate systems. Geographic Imager can also create beautiful images with mosaic elements.

Flaming Pear Software

• Price: from free to $76 (for different packages)

If you are looking for a set of tools for creating memorable photos, you will definitely like this site. Use Flood 2 to create realistic water reflections. Use Flexify 2 to work with spherical panoramas. Melancholytron will give your photos a touch of nostalgia. Lunar Cell will help you create an image of any planet you can think of. India Ink is the perfect plugin for working with halftones. SuperBladePro is a tool for working with surfaces and textures. With Mr.Contrast your photos will become more contrasty and detailed. SolarCell helps you create beautiful images of the sun. Hue and Cry is a great tool for mixing colors. With Gliterrato you can add realistic star images to your projects.

Machine Wash Deluxe

• Price: $99

This Photoshop plugin will add a touch of realism to any photo. After using Machine Wash Deluxe, your work will become more “deep” and charming. Textile textures, as well as aging and weathering effects, distinguish this plugin from many analogues.

Neat Image

• Price: from $39.90 (plugin for Photoshop HOME) to $99.90 (for Standalone and Photoshop plugin v8 PRO)

Neat Image is a Photoshop plugin that will instantly improve the quality of your photos. Use it to remove noise from any type of image: digital photos, scanned images, and printed photos. More than 8 types of noise (including luminance noise, band noise and grain) can be removed using Neat Image.

Photomatix

• Price: from $39 (Photomatix Essentials) to $119 (Photomatix Plus Pro Bundle)

If you want to convey everything you've seen with your own eyes through photographs, you can't do without this Photoshop plugin. Use a variety of presets to give your photos the right mood. The presets contain options such as Balanced, Painted, Natural, Vivid, Surreal and Enhanced.

Portraiture

• Price: $199.95

If you specialize in portraits, the Portraiture plugin is what you need. The developers of the plugin claim that using this tool you can easily retouch any photo. Improve your artwork without any damage to the texture. Moreover, this Photoshop plugin automatically monitors skin tone changes.

Rays

• Price: $50

This tool is designed to add light to photos. With it you can create beautiful ray effects. For example, you can add the glare of the sun to a photo of a dark forest, or some moonlight to a night landscape. Rays is a great plugin for those who want to create stylish and a little dramatic work.

Renamy

• Price: $14.99

If you constantly work with many layers at once, this tool will come in handy. With Renamy, you can select multiple layers at once and rename them with just one click. Moreover, thanks to Renamy, your list of items will always be simple and structured. But that's not all - Renamy also offers an auto-completion feature and an extended backup history.

Resize

• Price: from $79.99 (ON1 RESIZE 10.5) to $149.99 (ON1 PLUS PRO)

Resize is designed to enlarge photos up to 1000%. This is a great tool for interior designers and photographers working with large formats. With this plugin you can enlarge any image without losing quality. The Gallery Wrap function deserves special attention. With its help you can create required fields for wooden frames.

Shadow

• Price: $129

The name of this plugin speaks for itself. The developers claim that the Shadows v3.0 plugin is unique because it gives any image the effect of 3D space. With this plugin you can work in two modes: expert mode and beginner mode. A library of ready-made shadows will allow you to quickly select the desired effect.

Topaz Simplify

• Price: $39.99

This Photoshop plugin allows you to create various effects: oil paint effect, cartoon effect and even charcoal effect. Identify features around the edges of an object or design and modify them with Simplify. The plugin is also useful for removing unnecessary elements from an image.

StarSpikes Pro 4

• Price: $49.95

This plugin is best used at the final stage of image processing. With it, you can add sparkling “star” effects to your photos. Thanks to mathematical simulation of light diffraction, all effects look extremely realistic. You can separately use effects such as spot highlights, soft flash and ring flash. And with StarFilter Pro, you can add star effects even to photos taken during the daytime.

Subtle Patterns

• Price: $17.99

Subtle Patterns is a great choice for those who want a wide library of patterns at their fingertips. By clicking on any pattern, you specify it as the active layer style. You can also sort the list of patterns and create a list of the ones you need most.

ToonIt

• Price: $129

If you are a fan of cartoons, you will definitely like this plugin. You don't have to spend hours creating hand-painted or rotoscoped effects. The simple user interface will allow you to learn how to use this tool in no time. ToonIt is also considered the best tool for turning people's photos into cartoon characters.

Now you know which Photoshop plugins will make your work easier in this editor. Good luck!

Have you ever been confused by digital noise in a photo? It would seem like a great shot with good light. But, as soon as you make a slight mistake with the settings or find yourself in difficult conditions where you cannot do without a high ISO, a problem immediately arises.

What is the problem?

Landscape photographs are often shot in difficult lighting conditions. For example, at dawn or sunset, when shooting towards the sun, the scene turns out to be very contrasting with a large difference in brightness between shadows and highlights. When shooting at dusk, the contrast decreases, but the amount of light also decreases significantly, so you have to shoot at long shutter speeds, and the thicker the twilight becomes, the less detail remains in the shadow zones. When the photos are subsequently “developed” in a RAW converter, there is a need to still get some of the details out of the shadows, and at this moment noise appears in the image.

The number of examples can be continued. For example, noise will definitely appear in night photos taken at high ISO. They will be nearby if you suddenly make a gross mistake in exposure by 1-2 stops and then compensate for the error during processing. In general, noise in landscape photography is not such a rare phenomenon, and the ability to deal with it is an important skill for a photographer.

What to do?

The noise removal function is now available in many programs and plugins for Photoshop. More flexible settings usually have specialized noise reduction plugins. I use one of them in my work, and it’s called Noise Ninja (not included in Photoshop, needs to be installed additionally). Before starting to analyze the example, I’ll make a reservation that the method described below is universal and can be used with any other plugin for removing noise.

The photo we'll be working with was taken handheld at ISO400 with significant underexposure, so after adjusting the exposure to normal, the photo turned out to be noticeably noisy. Having quickly studied the frame, I identified two types of noise that would need to be eliminated in different ways.

The first is noise in the sky. This type of noise can be removed very easily, since in the clouds there are no objects with sharp boundaries or small details, and even with strong noise reduction, the clouds will look natural and natural.

The second is noise in the water and in shady areas of snow. There are a lot of small details in these areas, and achieving a natural look after noise reduction will be a little more difficult.

Let's start with a simple task and get rid of noise in the sky area. To do this, open the photo in Photoshop, create a copy of the original layer and call it “nonoise-sky”.

The convenience of working on a separate layer is obvious, since after applying noise reduction to the entire image, we can use masks to reduce the influence of the effect on individual parts of the photo, or reduce the effect as a whole by adjusting the transparency (“Opacity”) of the layer. The next step is to launch the Noise Ninja plugin. It is located in the menu Filters -> PictureCode -> Noise Ninja. When launched, the plugin automatically builds a photo profile:

Noise Ninja's interface is very simple. There is a large area with the original image, on the right in a small window you can see a piece of the photo enlarged to 100%, and below it are the main settings.

Let's look at the settings panel:

Everything is very simple here. There are only two main sliders: Strength and Smoothness. The first sets the strength of noise reduction: than more value, the less noise will remain in our photo. The second affects the degree of smoothing: the higher the Smoothness value, the less detail will remain in the final image. It is with these two settings that we will achieve a natural-looking picture. On the one hand, without noise, on the other hand, while maintaining the maximum possible amount of detail. The Contrast slider adjusts the contrast of the final image, but it's not very predictable, so I always leave it at its default position of 10.

Also on the panel there is a group of two settings with the word USM. They can sharpen a photo after applying noise reduction. Including these sliders here is logical, since reducing noise always leads to image blur and loss of detail. In this case, sharpening can slightly compensate for this effect, but, in turn, it can again show noise or add another problem to the image - visible artifacts. Therefore, I do not always use the USM group, only in simple cases where global sharpening for the entire image does not lead to other difficulties.

Another group of sliders called Colors allows you to work separately with colored noise, but in my practice there has not yet been a single case where I would want to use them. All three sliders are always in the middle position - 10. But on the contrary, I always turn on the Turbo and Coarse Noise checkboxes. Turbo speeds up the plugin without any visible quality problems, and Coarse Noise effectively removes low-frequency noise in the form of many small dots grouped into spots.

The main problem with noise reduction is to find a balance where the amount of noise is reduced to a normal level and the photo becomes clean, while we must lose a minimum amount of detail and achieve a natural look. appearance photos. If you just thoughtlessly turn the sliders to maximum, the result will be a “plastic” image: yes, without noise, but also without details. Let's look at this process using our example.

The first thing I do is turn off sharpening (USM amount = 0). Then, I find the place in the image where the noise reaches its maximum. This is usually the darkest area, often where it transitions to a lighter area. Now we are working only with the sky, and such an area is located near the horizon on the left side of the photo. The first step is to increase the Strength value to the maximum (20) and the Smoothness value to the minimum (0). After that, gradually moving the Smoothness slider to the right, you need to stop at the moment when the visible points of noise do not completely disappear at 100% crop. For our example, this happened with a value of Smoothness = 8.

At this stage, we have found the boundary position of the smoothing parameter, that is, we have essentially found out the threshold for the size of a part, after which it is considered noise. Now we need to reduce the effect of noise reduction so that the image does not look plastic. A small grain will still appear, but it will look natural and natural.

To reduce noise in the sky, the Strength value remained quite high (14), but for clouds without fine details this is normal. When reducing noise in more detailed parts of a photo, the effect is usually much less powerful. Also note that the Turbo and Coarse Noise checkboxes are enabled. Apply the settings with the OK button.

Now, if we look at the photo at 100% magnification, we see that the sky now looks much clearer, but the details on the ice and snow are hopelessly blurred. Let's fix this by limiting the effect of noise reduction to the sky area only. To do this, add a mask to the ‘nonoise-sky’ layer and draw a linear gradient over it from white to black, making the bottom part of the layer transparent.

Let's look at the photo again at 100% magnification:

Now everything is all right. The sky is noise-free, and the details from the original image have returned to the snow and ice.

Now let's deal with the noise in the detailed part of the photo. Here the approach will be different, since we can’t lose a lot of details and we won’t be able to increase the Strength value too much. It turns out that the force of influence should be minimal by definition, but in this case it will not be possible to get rid of all the noise. The good news is that noise in the image is not distributed evenly. There is less noise in light areas, and more in dark areas. Therefore, the main idea of ​​​​dealing with noise in areas with high detail is to “soften” the image a little, make it less sharp and micro-contrast, and then limit the effect of noise reduction only on dark areas. Let's try to implement this in Noise Ninja.

Create another copy of the original layer and call it “nonoise-water”.

Open Noise Ninja, set the Smoothness value to maximum (20), and then use the Strength slider to select the desired degree of softening of details in the area of ​​​​water and snow. The image will become a little less detailed, but still with enough detail so as not to lose the natural appearance.

Apply the settings with the OK button. Then add a black mask to the “nonoise-water” layer, take a soft white brush with a transparency of about 20% and carefully draw problem areas over the mask. As a result, the mask may look like this:

What is this all for?

The main goal of dealing with noise is not to completely suppress it, but to reduce its impact on the image to an acceptable level, while maintaining the natural appearance of the final photograph. A certain amount of noise is perfectly acceptable. And this degree of tolerance itself is dictated by the purposes for which you are preparing the image. For example, in stock photography there is a very intolerant attitude towards noise; microstocks are especially sensitive to it. Therefore, if you are preparing a stock photo, you would rather lose some detail, but get rid of noise almost completely. If we're talking about about preparing a photograph for printing, here, on the contrary, it is better not to get carried away with noise reduction, preserving more details. For publishing on the Internet, the fight against noise is practically meaningless, since when the image is reduced to 900-1200 pixels, all small details, including noise, will be lost by themselves. Therefore, even very noisy photographs taken at ISO1600 and higher will look very decent and high quality on a blog or website page.

I hope that now you will be in complete order with your noisy photos. Tell your friends on social networks about my method. May everything be fine for them too. 🙂

Size: 2123 KB
Price: $59.90
Compatibility with other editors: yes
Independent application: yes

Increasing sensor sensitivity digital camera causes grain to appear in photographs, also called noise. Sensitivity is measured in ISO units. Modern amateur equipment allows you to create clear, low-noise images using ISO over 1000, but just a few decades ago, Soviet black-and-white film with a sensitivity of 64 units was considered a standard that few dared to rise above, because the images were very grainy. And yet, despite such noticeable progress, users complain: photographs quite often come out with a high level of noise. Grain suppression is possible using a special class software, one of which is Neat Image Pro.

The program is distributed as an Adobe Photoshop plugin or an independent application. In the second case, you can download versions for Windows and Mac OSX from the official page. In addition, there is an option specifically optimized for Wine, a package for Linux that allows you to run many Windows applications on an open system.

Noise reduction consists of two stages. First you need to decide on image processing algorithms, and then all that remains is to apply a filter. The first stage is called profiling.

Creating a profile is necessary so that the program understands what level of noise it has to deal with and how strong its color component is. This operation can take place automatically or manual mode. The first option is called up using the Auto Profile button. Following the logic of the mode's name, the entire operation is carried out with one click. The program independently selects an area of ​​the image on the basis of which noise reduction algorithms are adjusted.

Manual mode involves rectangular texture selection. It should be as uniform as possible. The program regards any transitions in color or brightness as noise. However, when selecting contrasting objects, a warning immediately appears about the impossibility of creating a correct profile. The specific color channel is indicated where, according to the program, there is excessive detail. If no warnings are displayed, then using the context menu, you can start the profile creation procedure.

Profiles are usually tied to the hardware and the sensor sensitivity used. It is believed that photographs taken with the same camera at the same ISO will have an identical noise structure. The program allows you to save profiles as program settings. The official page contains a large number of profiles for popular cameras that use different ISOs.

The second tab, Noise Filter Settings, contains noise reduction control options. You can control the color and brightness components of noise separately. If you remove the color, the noise turns into a “noble” grain, reminiscent of high-speed film. In some scenes this is even justified, but by default the program tries to eliminate both components of noise. In addition, additional enhancement of image sharpness is provided.

The program includes a large number of subject programs that allow you to intelligently reduce noise levels in various conditions. You can, for example, remove only coarse grains or, on the contrary, carefully process small parts.

Neat Image Pro contains several useful utilities. For example, you can view the contents of a profile texture. The dialog box contains information about the quality of the profile, as well as numerical characteristics of the various noise components.

The program also allows you to create profiles for scanners by comparing the original image and its scanned version. To do this, you need to print a special document - a target, and then transfer the information to the computer again, this time through a scanner.

Neat Image Pro includes its own batch file conversion tool. You can automate both the creation of profiles and the actual noise reduction procedure. In the first case, you need to specify the folder with the target documents, and in the second, select the directory with the original images containing noise.

You can work with two types of interface. They differ in the number of available settings. The Advanced mode is different in that you can control the degree of noise reduction, taking into account texture detail, and also separately adjust the level of color channels. During profiling, you can control the equalizer, which describes the noise level in each color channel depending on certain degrees of brightness.

Hello everyone, in today's post I have for you an excellent plugin for getting rid of noise in photos. Imagenomic Noiseware. Earlier I wrote about - this is also a good plugin, I advise you to take a look... Well, let's get started.

Installing Noiseware

Once you have downloaded this plugin, you will of course need to install it. The archive contains everything you need for this and even an activator. Install - launch Photoshop - look here: Filter – Imagenomic – Noisewere Professional….

If it doesn’t appear, it doesn’t matter.

• Open the disk as in most cases C:\Program Files\Imagenomic
• Folder “ Noiseware Professional Plug-in” copy to \Adobe Photoshop\App\Photoshop\Plug-ins . I hope you figure it out, if you have any problems, write in the comments.
• Let's launch Photoshop.

Now everything should definitely work. Open the desired photo, open Imagenomic as in the picture. And then you will be politely asked to register, well, we are decent, so we click the Install License button.

Well, well, now you can run keygen and generate a key.

If I'm not busy, I write only for information. In general, click OK and we work. If you encounter any difficulties, write to us.

Working with the plugin

Let's say there is a photograph that makes quite a bit of noise!

We launch the newly installed toy, there will be a lot of sliders, tabs and other things that are scary at first glance. But everything is much simpler, it’s easy to get rid of noise, and even in 2 clicks. See:

Clickable, click to enlarge.

What can I say, the result is obvious! The photograph has improved significantly. Of course, there is a minus - the picture is a little blurry, but if you add sharpness, then everything falls into place :) And if you also play with the sliders manually, the result will be even better.

I guess that's all for today, stay tuned, there will be a lot more interesting things to come!

Good luck!

How to remove noise from a photo so as to preserve small details and leave maximum frame sharpness? The question is quite complex and very common. That is why many tools have been developed to combat noise in different programs and plugins.

The ideal solution to the problem of noise is to prevent it from occurring during the shooting process:

• set the correct one;
• If possible, take photographs in RAW format;
• compose the frame so that it is not cropped too much during processing.

But if all conditions were met during shooting, but there is still noise...

How to remove noise from a photo:

How to remove noise in Adobe Photoshop:

Before direct noise removal, on critical images, in each channel, for more subtle removal. This allows you to retain more detail in the image and achieve better results.

Reduce Noise Filter

In order to remove noise from photos in Photoshop, there is a special filter Filter – Noise – Reduce Noise (Filter – Noise – Remove Noise).

The dialog box presents two modes of filter operation:

Basic—sets parameters to remove noise from all channels equally.

Advanced – it becomes possible to configure noise removal parameters in each channel individually (Per Channel) and a setting similar to the Basic mode – (Overall) (Fig. 1.).

Rice. 1 - Reduce Noise Dialog Box

The Strength parameter adjusts the amount of luminance (tone) noise reduction in all channels.

The Preserve Details option allows you to preserve some detail in the image. But the higher the parameter value, the less noise is removed. The value of the parameter is determined empirically, depending on the source image and the Strength parameter.

The Reduce Color Noise option allows you to reduce the level of chromatic noise.

The Sharpen Details option allows you to sharpen the image.

The Remove JPEG Artifact checkbox masks the square image fragments that appear during JPEG compression.

Rice. 2 — Example of the Reduce Noise filter action

The filter can be applied several times to enhance the effect. Short command Ctrl + F.

Adobe Camera RAW plugin

Adobe Camera RAW– a plugin that allows you to process graphic files before directly opening them in Adobe Photoshop. It was designed specifically for the RAW format, in which most professional digital cameras save photos.

If the source file is not in RAW format, but for example, JPEG, then in Photoshop there is a function that will allow you to open the image in Adobe Camera RAW File – Open As (File – Open as) – select Camera RAW – select file – Open (Fig. 3 ).

Rice. 3 — How to open a file in Camera RAW

In order to remove noise from a photo, you need to go to the Detail tab (Fig. 4). In the Noise Reduction column, you need to raise Luminance to the level where noise begins to disappear and lower Luminance Detail to a minimum, followed by raising it to reveal fine details. Same with Color , Color Detail.

The Luminance parameter adjusts the level of luminance noise reduction.

The Luminance Detail parameter adjusts the noise reduction threshold. A low value gives a cleaner result, but with noise, details are lost.

The Luminance Contrast parameter adjusts the luminance contrast between light and dark areas. Small values ​​give better noise reduction results, but at the same time lower contrast and a more blurred image.

The Color parameter adjusts the level of chromatic noise reduction.

The Color Detail parameter adjusts the chromatic noise reduction threshold.

Rice. 4 — Detail tab. Example of Camera RAW plugin action

It is also possible to remove noise in Photoshop Lightroom; it has an intuitive interface, which is built similar to the Adobe Camera RAW plugin.

As you can see from the above examples, the Adobe Camera RAW plugin does a better job of suppressing digital noise than the Reduce Noise filter. Also among the advantages of Camera RAW:

• carrying out non-destructive image processing;
• synchronization of settings among images taken under the same conditions to increase processing productivity;
• performance (Photoshop is not loaded yet);
• intuitive interface.

Noise reduction plugins

To suppress noise, in addition to Adobe Photoshop, other programs and plug-ins (most often RAW converters) are also used. They are both paid and free.

Plugins for Photoshop: Adobe Camera RAW, Topaz DeNoise, Neat Image, Grain Surgery, Noise Ninja.

RAW converters(selected programs): Adobe Lightroom, Capture One, Bibble (Corel), Apple Aperture (Mac OS X only).