If only Noise Buster could work on the bags under our eyes.
When dealing with digital photographs, noise can be a frustrating bugaboo, usually in the form of pixilation and speckles in your images. Whether you’re using a simple point-and-shoot camera or a high-end digital SLR—especially when using high ISO settings for low-light shooting situations—tools for dealing with noise in post-processing are essential. While Photoshop has some decent noise-reduction technology, Avkis’ Noise Buster goes the extra mile, providing very precise controls for correcting even very noisy images.
Noise Buster is a plug-in designed to work within Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or as a standalone app—and it works well in all three situations. Be aware, though, that the plug-in actually links to the standalone application, so even if you only intend to use Noise Buster from within Photoshop, you’ll need to have the standalone version installed in your Applications folder. Once you invoke the plug-in, you’re presented with a single-panel interface containing all of the controls and options. Unfortunately, the choice of icons and interface elements strays from Mac standards, but we were able to get up to speed without major aggravation.
Once past those issues, we found that Noise Buster actually does a wonderful job removing noise artifacts, while retaining a very high degree of image sharpness and detail. There are separate sliders for dealing with luminance and color noise, with fine-tuning for determining exactly how much noise there is in the image and how much smoothing to apply to the noise. We found that trying different ratios of color to luminance noise reduction was best done on a picture-by-picture basis, as there was no single ideal setting to correct all images.
If you’re using a lower-end digital camera or enjoy pushing your DSLR’s low-light sensitivity to extremes, Noise Buster is a low-priced, highly capable tool for cleaning up your shots.
Excellent noise-reduction capabilities. Inexpensive.
Nonstandard interface.
