Low Light Photography
By J.L. Sofka
29 Aug 2010
Back in the film days, low light photography was achieved by using high speed film and pushing the development time. Now we can easily shoot any time of the day and make corrections using digital software. I just recently discovered that there are programs such as Noiseware and Noise Ninja that reduce or eliminate the unsightly grainyness produced by not having enough light in the image.
Noiseware makes a standard edition that can be downloaded for free so that's what I used in some of these photos. I use Corel Photo Paint and Corel Paint Shop pro as my main photo editing programs. Both have noise removal capability, but they don't clean up an image like Noiseware does.
My work flow is fairly simple. I open my images with Microsoft Picture Manager which is a super easy program for cropping and rotating. Then I import to Noiseware which offers various levels of noise removal. For most images, I fine tune the image in Corel by increasing contrast, bumping up the color and sharpening using unsharp mask and/or edge preserve smooth. Voila, nice crisp night shots!
1 response
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Ryan Watkins gave props (29 Aug 2010):
Great shots well done!
