What is Noise Reduction?

Noise Reduction cleans up grainy or noisy photos by smoothing out unwanted pixel artifacts while preserving edges and detail. Useful for photos taken in low light, at high ISO, or from older cameras.

The tool denoises in YCbCr space so it can treat brightness and color grain separately. The Luminance slider smooths gritty texture gently (over-doing it is what makes skin look plastic), while the Color slider can be pushed harder to erase red-green speckle without softening edges. Detail Preservation protects edge pixels so faces and text stay crisp, and Radius widens the sample window for chunkier grain. Pick an image type — Portrait, Landscape, or Text/Scan — to tune everything for your subject in one tap, or grab a Light/Medium/Strong strength preset. The result auto-refreshes as you drag, and an expandable panel under the comparison lets you re-edit and re-apply without re-uploading. Export as PNG for a pristine copy, or JPEG/WebP with adjustable quality when file size matters.

How to use

1. Upload the noisy image — supports JPG, PNG, and WebP formats
2. Pick an image type (Portrait, Landscape, Text) or a strength preset, then fine-tune the Luminance, Color, and Detail sliders to balance smoothness and sharpness
3. Preview the result side-by-side, then download the cleaned image

When to use

• Cleaning up dim concert or restaurant shots where ISO ran high and grain crept in.
• Salvaging old scans of family photos that picked up scanner-sensor speckle.
• Smoothing video thumbnails so the YouTube preview doesn't look gritty next to clean ones.

Result

A concert photo taken at ISO 6400 has grain plus red-green color speckle. Upload it, tap the Portrait image type so faces stay natural, push Luminance to about 70 and Color noise a little higher, and download a cleaner version with smooth backgrounds and sharp eyes.

FAQ

Will noise reduction make my photo look soft or plasticky?

It can if you push the noise sliders too high while Detail Preservation is low. Start with Luminance around 50 and Detail 60, then nudge each one until the side-by-side preview shows clean backgrounds and faces that still hold sharp eyelashes and text.

What do the Luminance and Color sliders do, and how is Radius different?

Luminance smooths brightness grain and Color smooths the chroma speckle; both work by averaging neighbouring pixels, just on different channels. Radius decides how far that averaging reaches. A bigger radius catches chunky low-light grain but slows processing and can soften fine detail.

Does this also fix JPEG compression artefacts and banding?

Partially. The smoothing pass reduces the high-frequency mottle that comes with heavy compression, but blocky 8x8 macroblocks from extreme JPEG quality settings won't disappear completely. Combine with a slight blur for tougher cases.

What file size and resolution can I upload?

PNG, JPEG, and WebP up to about 20 MB load reliably. Very large RAW conversions over 8000 px on one side may slow your device or hit its memory limit — downscale to a working size first.

Why is colour noise (red and green dots) different from luminance grain?

Luminance grain is brightness variation, which the eye reads as texture. Color noise is chroma error, the random red and green specks. They get their own sliders here: lean on Luminance for gritty texture and push Color higher to wipe out the speckle, since color can be smoothed harder without blurring edges.

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