[gd]

ok ok ok, so I've spent approximately 4 hours in a course over the last two weeks and it took the guy teaching me that long to get to the subject of Levels and Histogram.

While I don't really know what I'm looking for in a histogram (apart from Histogrammy goodness) the concept of levels has intrigued me. I had some buggered up shots where the background was lit white so that the foreground was dark as buggery (that's a lot btw). With levels I found I can get a better result than trying the contrast/brightness approach. And it's opened up some photos that I thought I'd junk before this. However, I *think* I get some noise with that answer. I certainly get noisier than I like with the contrast/brightness approach.

What are some approaches people use to levels and noise reduction?

Next step after this is saturation and colour balance.. but baby steps gd, baby steps.

[smelly]

I use two different programs for levels and noise reduction. Levels tend not to give me too much trouble with noise, but when there are issues, I use noise Ninja to de-noise-ify my shots.

Another editing trick with the black foreground/white background thing is to use the 'Shadow/Highlight' tool. If used wrongly it looks really badly edited, but it works sometimes.

[slejhamer]

Digital sensor signal-to-noise ratio increases as the exposure value increases, so an underexposed photo will show significantly more noise than one that is properly exposed or even slightly over-exposed. In other words, if you underexpose by a stop and then use levels to open up the shadows, it's like increasing your ISO setting (sensor gain) by a stop - going from ISO 200 to 400 for example. Actually it's worse in terms of the noise that shows up.

In most cases the noise-reduction feature in Capture One does an adequate job, and automatically scales the intensity based on the image ISO. I've heard good things about Noise Ninja, but I use Neat Image when necessary and it suits my needs.

You can also switch to LAB mode and try adding some gaussian blur to just the A or B channel, whichever seems worse.

[pai]

you can also try using curves instead of levels, it gives you even more control over which parts become brighter/darker. the middle eye-dropper for both levels and curves is also handy for a quick white balance fix.

not much to add regarding the noise. try neat image (there's a free version), or noiseware (free).