How to Easily Denoise Photos in GIMP

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you how to reduce color noise and luminance noise using I'll be using git version 2.10 point 18 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial but of course before I get into that I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies media design.com as always I have tons of and Inkscape tutorials on here as well as my book of layers and and Inkscape help articles so definitely check that out you can enroll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy you can enroll in any of my Skillshare classes by visiting school com Annie can get more with a premium membership to Davies media design your premium membership includes access to things like my Help Center app ebooks like my book of layers and content not found on YouTube you could start your premium membership with a 7 day free trial and I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so today's tutorial is all about how to remove noise in your photographs and there is primarily two types of noise there's luminance noise and color noise luminance noise is going to occur whatever you see those sort of white dots in your photo that you don't want that happens often when you have your ISO turned way up on your camera and maybe you're taking photos in a dark place on the other hand there's also color noise found in photos this can also be caused by your sensor on your camera or whenever you are editing your photo inside of something like so for example I'll hold ctrl and zoom in here on my photograph you can see a good example of color noise based on these color artifacts that you see here the colors just aren't right and this is sort of noise that's caused by some of the photo editing I did on this photograph but you can see there's specks of color here so that's going to occur whenever pixels in your photo take on the wrong color I'll hold ctrl and zoom in more and you can see the luminance noise here as well so these white dots are going to be whenever your pixel takes on the wrong brightness in your photo so when you combine those two you can see here there's a decent amount of noise again this photograph actually doesn't have that much noise because the ISO was pretty low when I took the photo the lighting was pretty good but there's still noise in here that we need to get rid of and of course this technique will work for you guys who have photographs that do have a lot more noise so I'll hold ctrl and zoom out and I'm just going to shift click this is what my photo is going to look like without the noise so when i zoom in you'll see there's a lot less color noise and there's less luminance noise as well so I'll start this tutorial by getting rid of the color noise first I'll open up the photograph by used so here it is and if I hold ctrl zoom in you can see lots of color noise etc so to get rid of the color noise this part is pretty easy I'm just going to duplicate the photograph and let's rename this color noise if the enter key and now I'm going to go to filters blur Gaussian blur I'll hold ctrl and zoom in what I'll do is just blur this until the colors all blend together and you can no longer really see the color noise we don't need to do it too much just enough to get rid of the noise and maybe actually that will work right there so you can see that most of the noise now has been blended together but of course now our image is super blurry so I'm gonna click OK and in order to get rid of the blur I'm gonna come over to the color noise layer go to the layer mode and I'm just gonna scroll down until I get to HSL color so for those of you who have watched my tutorial on all 38 layer modes in you may remember that HSL color is going to take the hue and saturation from the top layer and combine it with the luminance of the bottom layer so what that does is it takes the colors we created by blending them together and it pairs it with the luminance below and so what we get is instead of having these fringe color distortions here as well as the color noise now instead we get rid of all that color noise and you can see all that has been fixed the issue of course is that we still have a lot of luminance noise and in fact by getting rid of the color noise it brings out the luminance noise even more so that's the second step here and this step is going to require gimmick which is a free plugin I'll link that in the description of the video I've used it in other videos in the past so with the gimmick plug-in what you'll need to do is now use some sort of smoothing filter that is actually something that a lot of other software do when it comes to denoising luminance noise but what to do first is put everything onto a visible layer so I'll go to layer new from visible and now we'll take this visible layer and we'll come over to filters gimmick QT and what I did is I typed in smooth and you'll see there's actually a variety of smoothing filters that you can use inside of the gimmick plugin what i recommend doing is just previewing the area that you want to remove the noise from and if you want to you can cycle through these and see which one works best and play with the settings what i found is that for really intense cases you can go with the dream smoothing so you'll see here that that will smooth this quite a bit but if you have really bad noise instances that will remove that noise pretty well on the other hand for less intense cases I'll scroll down I actually found that smooth guided works pretty well and you can play here with the amount of smoothness this is mainly going to increase or decrease how much smoothing is going to happen here I went with around 178 the first time and the other filter I really like actually isn't here under smooth I'm gonna type in skin so easy skin retouch is the other one I really like so you'll see here and as I move this along you can see how much of the noise gets taken away what this plugin also does is it's going to smooth the skin a little bit so it'll actually improve the complexion of the person you're working on and of course you can adjust the settings here to your liking if you want to test out multiple filters without having to apply the filter and then reopen gimmick every time what you can do for example is come over here to output mode and change this to new layer and then click apply and if you have a larger image this process may take some time so I'll move this out of the way and here is the copy layer so this one I'm gonna double click and rename skin retouch so we know which filter we used and now if I hide it here's before you can see a lot more noise going on here's after and with this being on its own layer we can turn down the opacity and that will turn down the effect or I can come over to the layer mode and change this to blend this with B layer below so I'll come back to the gimmick filter I can as I mentioned type in a different smoothing filter so I can apply one of these filters add it to a new layer or I can just keep the single filter I use which I'll do in this case for the sake of time so if i shift-click here is a before shift-click again here's an after and now we have a photo with a lot less noise all right so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did you could check out my youtube channel at youtube.com slash Davey's media design don't forget to click the bell icon to be notified each time I have a brand new tutorial you can also check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video but thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 33,596

Rating: 4.8606272 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2020, photo editing, denoise, noise reduction, GMIC, gaussian blur, photo repair

Id: Ie4yrT0angI

Length: 7min 25sec (445 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 06 2020