In this Adobe Photoshop Playbook video, Bryan O'Neil Hughes suggests a variety of options to help you tackle noise when processing your photographs. Due to the improvement of pixel quality, noise isn't usually so much of an issue. However, it still can be a problem especially in your low light images.
Hughes recommends using Camera Raw and shows you how to effectively reduce colour noise and luminance noise. He also mentions the reduce noise slider under Image size in Photoshop CC as well as Smart sharpen. Due to software evolving, Hughes advises against using Filter > Noise > Reduce noise.
[Via PhotographyBay]
One additional thing you can try with shadow noise, and this is dependent on the image to some degree, is to simply add yellow to your blacks to neutralize the blue channel noise, which is the noisiest color channel. This reduces the amount of color and luminance noise reduction that you need to apply. Color noise reduction, while generally not as noticeable as luminance noise reduction, will affect areas of finer detail, so like luminance noise reduction, the less you can get away with applying, the better.
Well, the best way would be to avoid the noise in the first place by shooting a HUGE HDR image.
That was great! So helpful!
i just have one question, why keep the "reduce noise" filter in the software if it does nothing, according to Adobe?
Probably legacy use, IE opening a file that used reduce noise in an earlier version of Photoshop. I also wouldn't be surprised to see Adobe ameliorate reduce noise in the future.
That makes sense. I don't understand why they haven't done that already and make you go into ACR to do so.
"I also wouldn't be surprised to see Adobe ameliorate reduce noise in the future."
Maybe, maybe not. As of CS6 (the version I work with), the radial blur filter was still in there. This dates back, I believe, to Photoshop 1! It hasn't changed one bit since then. I know they introduced a new vector-based blur process in CC, is the old radial blur filter still in CC?