Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 Studio Techniques

Luminance Smoothing

Luminance Smoothing is designed to reduce the noise that shows up when you use high ISO settings with your digital camera (Figure 9.31). It won't deal with those colorful specks you see on occasion (that's what Color Noise Reduction is for), but it should be able to handle the dark specks that you get when you try to brighten up an image that was shot in low lighting conditions. All you need to do is zoom in to 100% view (double-click on the Zoom tool to get there), and then experiment with the slider until the noise is minimized (Figure 9.32). Just be sure to look at the fine detail in your image to make sure it hasn't removed important detail like freckles or skin texture.

Figure 9.31. Zooming in on this image reveals ...