How to reduce noise in an image without losing detail

With each passing year, cameras are getting better and better at keeping digital noise to a minimum. Despite this, there are still times when you need to shoot at a high ISO and will inevitably end up with an amount of noise you aren’t pleased with.

Thankfully, this can be fixed in post production. The tradeoff though, is usually that details are lost in the image due to the smoothing of the noise.

To help show you how to reduce noise without compromising on the details of photographs, photographer Jimmy McIntyre has shared a helpful YouTube tutorial.

In the three-minute video, McIntyre explains how to retain the details of an image while simultaneously reducing noise. The catch is, you have to have multiple exposures. The idea is that by capturing multiple exposures of the same image, you end up with different noise signatures on each photo. You then use this as an advantage to effectively cancel the noise out of all of the exposures.

Specifically, he explains how you can auto-align the multiple exposures you have, then use the ‘mean’ stacking mode to bring all of the images together and smooth out the noise without worrying about making your images look like a watercolor painting