So, I have been thinking about getting some noise reduction software for sometime now. I always feel that my higher ISO pictures from my D90, such as 1600, were not quite as good as I would like, but I always seem to need to shoot at that speed.

Well, I jumped off the fence the other day. The wedding shot that I did had a lot of outdoor shots in the dark with some flash added. Turns out I didn’t hit my bride and groom with quite enough light. Lesson learned. But, I need to salvage this somehow.

I did a bit of web research and decided on Noise Ninja. This plugin has been around for a while now, and there are some really good challengers. In the end I decided based on price, and that they had both a Phtotoshop and Aperture plugin to go with their stand alone app.

Here are the comparison images. First is without Noise Ninja.

Here is the same image with Noise Ninja applied in Photoshop.

These images are super zoomed in, and I wish that I had hit them with more light, but the second image is cleaned up quite a bit. The noise reduction has made them softer than I would have liked, but it is a good compromise with noise removal. This was done with a D90 user contributed profile that I found on their site. I don’t really know how to use it yet, but it was a good start.