How I Learned To Love NIK Dfine

There are many software products in use to reduce unwanted high ISO, or random noise in night sky images. The most effective method is to stack multiple exposures of the night sky, aligning the layers accurately with respect to one another, and then applying a median noise reduction filter to the image stack. But this approach cannot be used unless multiple exposures of the sky were originally produced in the field during image capture. When there is only a single exposure of the sky to work with, we must employ the traditional single-image noise reduction algorithms included within Photoshop, Lightroom, or any of the other image editing programs we might work with. I have been using NIK Dfine to reduce noise in these images, and it turns out I had been doing it wrong! In this post I show how to set up and use customized Color Range controls in NIK Dfine that are tailored to the unique properties of the specific image I am working on. Along the way you will see an experiment I conducted using luminosity masking combined with fill adjustment layers to mitigate high ISO noise, and see how NIK Dfine carries the concept to a much higher level than I could hope to achieve.  See How I Learned To Love NIK Dfine to read more…..