Updated November 18th 2004

This is one way of dealing with noise in digital images, since it involves taking 3-4 images with perfect registration, naturally it is best suited for the studio, or location work using a good tripod. This process can be applied to any digital camera. These samples was shot with my Olympus e-10 Digital SLR set to 80asa, f.11 1 sec. the camera was set to save the files as tiff files to prevent noise from jpeg compression.

The one to the left is the RAW capture image and the right one is the finalcomposite result of 4 seperate images.

Notice how significant the reduction of noise in the surface areas are, and also now nicely this process adds to the details of the car, liks the quality of the edges and the "nails" in the door and side panel.

Click here for a copy fo the final file

Try this at home. Capture 4 matching images with your digital camera mounted firmly on a tripod, then using Photoshop, composite them all into one file, by pasting them into each their layer. this would give you "background" "layer 1" "layer 2" "layer 3". Leave the Background as it is, set layer 1 to 75% opasity, layer 2 to 50% opasity and layer 3 to 25% opasity. Flatten the image and you are done.

I only use it for studio product work, it is not really a hassle since I already wrote a action for the process, and the slight slowdows reminds me that I used to use a medium format for this kind of photography.

PHOTO SAMPLER

This guys have just finished a VERY cool application to do all of this automatically, if you at all need noiseless images you have to check this out. It is called SUPER SAMPLER, and it ROCKS. Also check out the pro version with lots of extra features, this software is "must have" if you need noise free studio images from a digital camera..

NEAT IMAGE

This is another little stand alone application which does not "sample" a series a images like Photo Sampler does, but it works on one image. You could do the same thing in Photoshop, but this is a easy way to save a little time. Though the results are not as good as with Photo Sampler.

Click here to return to Bo's e-10 page