How to reduce noise??

[fairy bombs]

Hello

Looking for some help,re PP,I mainly use CS5 sometimes DPP.

I am not at good at PP. I usually open up RAW and adjust temp,then may be recovery slider,then clarity
and vibrance adjust.

The into layers-Levels seems to make quite a bit of difference for a small movement of slider.then may be
some curves.

I the flattern image and adjust in un sharp mask.Then crop .

See first image in this link,for a basic attempt (the image was not the best,but its a hard to capture hawk)

http://www.ausphotography.net.au/forum/showthread.php?95559-Collared-Sparrowhawk-(Accipiter-cirrhoecesphalus)

There is a noise reduction feature in CS 5 but nor sure how to set it,I got some information on settings for
un sharp mask-and its seems good (from a bird tut forum)

I have 'neat image' it does help,but it really reduces the size of file,and changes colour very slightly)

Starting to learn and use masks-which I am told really helps.

Any links to tuts on masking or reducing noise levels,would be most helpful.

Thanks

[William]

I use this Plug in to CS5 : http://www.imagenomic.com/nwpg.aspx There is a stand alone free community version as well : Here : http://www.imagenomic.com/download_nwsa.aspx

[agb]

You could do some noise reduction in Camera Raw first.
Damien Symonds has good information on how to do it here
http://damiensymonds.blogspot.com/2010/07/raw-noise-reduction.html
and you could also read this.
http://damiensymonds.blogspot.com/2010/03/using-noiseware-community-edition.html

[Lance B]

I second William's suggestion of Imagenomic's "Noiseware" Plug In for Photoshop. Best noise reduction progam I've ever used.

[ameerat42]

I had this prepared, then the site went into maintenance as I was posting it. Cannot find anything saved.

This is from CS2, since you asked about CS5.
The main NR controls are Strength and Color Noise. Beware of the jpeg artifacts remover: it sometimes appears to add artifacts of its own.

When you remove colour noise you will notice some slight change in colour - where there was a lot of noise. I have the same Neat Image, but only the free version, that does NR in blocks of 1024 pixels. The full version does the lot.

Thanks William for that plug-in.

82095

[fairy bombs]

Thank you all who replied,I really appreciate all that useful information.

I will go forward with all that!.

I do not have 'neat image',I have some other free down load,think its called noise works.

I did have a play with that hawk image in it,and it improved it

here it is in this link

http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=83488

I then put it through CS 5 and made the file a much larger size-should I wish to print.

Anyhow thanks so much those AP members that took the time to give advice.and links

[ving]

I use the noise reduction that is built into Paintshop Pro x3, works fine for me.