Managing Digital Noise: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

If you’ve ever wondered about the “grainy” look that keeps popping up in your digital photos, you’re in the right place. You may be aware that it’s called digital noise, and that there’s a lot of technology floating around to help photographers try and stamp it out of their images.

Although it’s often used to mimic the grainy appearance of traditional film photography, digital noise and film grain are completely different animals. Whereas grain is usually considered to add character to a photo, noise is generally regarded as… well, a nuisance at best. At worst, it’s seen as a sign of poor quality.

But if you look very closely, you’ll find that some level of noise exists in almost all digital photography. If it’s managed well and incorporated thoughtfully, we don’t even notice it. Sometimes, noise even has a positive impact on the finished photo. We’ll get to that in a moment, but first:

What Is Noise?

Although there are several different potential causes of noise in digital photography, the result is the same: artifacts that appear in your image. The word “artifact” can be confusing the first time you hear it in this context, but we aren’t talking about historical treasures here. Artifacts in this sense are imperfections. In the case of digital noise, that usually…