Moonrise -- with freeware noise reduction

2010.07.29

filtered night scene

filtered full suppression

original

filtered night scene

filtered full suppression

Original

filtered night scene

filtered full suppression

original

night setting

full suppression setting

I took the advice of a photoblog friend, Wasichseh, to try a freeware program for noise reduction.
http://www.photo-freeware.net/download_win-eng.php?id=163
Here is a comparison set. I have the 'before' photo first, and the filtered photo night scene second and full noise suppression third. I think it made a nice improvement especially in the first shot. I use adobe lightroom, and it has some noise reduction options, but this one seemed to work better. I used the 'night scene' settings. It might be possible to get even better results with tweaking it, but I honestly didn't know enough about the settings to make custom adjustments. Thought it might be interesting to see the comparisons.

BTW, I ended up returning my new lap top-- I was disappointed with the LED screen, it had a very pixelated look (if that is the right way to describe it), jagged edges-- not near the clarity of my 4 year old dell inspiron (which does have a bit of a brownish tint to it, LCD). The new one was a Toshiba satellite-"HD TruBrite LED-backlit TFT LCD widescreen displayNVIDIA GeForce 310M with NVIDIA Optimus, 4 ram,Intel Core i5-450M processor2.40GHz (2.53GHz with Turbo Boost Technology), 3MB L3 Cache4GB DDR3 system memory 'Gives you the power to handle most power-hungry applications and tons of multimedia work' 500GB SATA hard drive"- it has very good reviews. I set all the display setting and graphics card settings to the highest quality, but still wasn't clear and sharp. I also had a terrible time trying to get the excessive blue tint out of the display. I was going to attempt to calibrate it following advice of Revenant, when the touch mouse pad started to freeze up for no reason and require re-booting several times. That was the last straw for this machine. So, back on my old inspiron, and will probably get another dell when I have a chance. I was having difficulty running lightroom on my less than 1 ram memory, and 100 gb hard drive -it was freezing up a lot and suddenly shutting down. Most of my photos are on an external hard drive. I did learn another lesson-- don't move the photos to the external drive without going through lightroom. I lost all the lightroom editing steps. I still have the original photos, and the saved final edit, but I can't go back and tweak them and see what I had done from the original to get the final result. There might be a solution to this-- though I couldn't find it in the 2 books I have on using lightroom. Live and learn :)

I recently got Lightroom 3 and am very happy with it although it keeps duplicating files onto my original hard drive when I was trying to keep them on an external hard drive. Can't quite figure that out yet. I think it does a great job with noise. Your photos are fabulous and I love that red moon! Can see the difference and like it the most in the photo of the gals on the boat!

darfoster · 2010-07-29: 00:37