Review: Eliminate Photo Noise with Noiseware for iPhone

Here’s Why You Need Noiseware for iOS

Photographic noise are those speckles that sometimes appear in your digital photos. You probably see them most often in very dark photos which were shot in low light.

Noiseware for iPhone and iPad ($3.99) reduces or eliminates an impressive amount of digital noise from photographs. There are many noise reduction tools available for iPhone, but Noiseware is clearly among the best of class.

Whether you are reworking a noisy photo from an older iPhone or camera or processing an image shot in very low light, sometimes you just can’t avoid digital noise. Despite the increasing improvements in each new generation of iPhone camera, digital noise can be an unwanted artifact that every iPhoneographer will deal with. Often times, post-processing a noisy image only amplifies the “static.”

Noiseware is a quick, easy-to-use utility that exceeded my initial expectations and redefines what good noise reduction is for iOS. Honestly, it’s that good.

Using Noiseware to Reduce Noise in Photos

The user interface is clean and easy to figure out an navigate. Simply import an image and select one of the four noise reduction presets – weak noise reduction, strong NR, night photography, or default (just right…). For more precise adjustments, there’s a custom mode with 0 to 100 slider controls for noise reduction and exposure enhancement as well as a turbo switch to help with excessive noise. Adjust as much or as little to preference.

I was amazed by the results. To test Noiseware, I first processed an extremely grainy photo shot with an old original iPhone 2G in a dimly lit bar (yes, during Dallas Banana Crawl). The noise almost makes the photo unusable. With a custom setting of 100% and Excessive Noise turned on, not only did Noiseware eliminate most of the noise, but it kept most of the detail in the image. While not perfect, image quality is significantly improved and is now a much better starting point for additional processing or apping. Results compare favorably to Luminance Noise Reduction in Photoshop Creative Cloud for desktop (see the full-size gallery above) and took much less time to process.

I achieved similar results with low-light night photography. In the snow image, there is a lot of noise in the dark areas. Noiseware eliminated most of it while holding the detail of the smaller branches in the trees. The processed version is sharper, clearer and a much more inviting photo.

Noiseware also does a great job reducing the color artifacts — blotchy remnants — that are sometimes revealed when you remove photo noise. Areas of color look smoother and less like badly compressed JPGs.

The app is rock-solid. It never crashed no matter what I threw at it. Noiseware doesn’t reduce the pixel dimensions of your photo and won’t strip out EXIF data, either.

The exposure tool and by extension the Night Shot preset are pretty rough. I didn’t like how it brightens photos across the spectrum instead of intelligently brightening shadow areas like the Shadows/Highlights tool of Instaflash Pro, Snapseed, or Photogene. But that’s far from a deal-breaker for me — the real magic in this app is its excellent noise reduction.

Many other noise reduction tools for iPhone and iPad simply apply an overall blur to an image by a small number of pixels. This makes your image look soft, blurry, and reduces detail. Others use a more advanced method by reducing luminance noise, which keeps a lot of the detail.

Noiseware uses a proprietary noise reduction and sharpening algorithm to achieve impressive noise reduction and detail. It’s the iPhone version of Imagenomic’s flagship Photoshop plugin — also an impressive piece of software. Priced at four bucks, it’s a lot less expensive than the $80 for the desktop version.

The Bottom Line

Not all noise is bad for a photo. For some, myself included, it’s the digital equivalent of analog film grain. But, too much noise can make a photo unusable. some images may be too dark or too grainy to fix, but Noiseware is an remarkable tool that can help save a borderline image or as part of everyday image clean up before processing. Results on most images are as good as or better than any comparable tool in the App Store and are even better than several of Photoshop’s noise reduction less-advanced tools.

App Store link: Noiseware – Imagenomic

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Photos by Stacy Anderson

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