Working with digital images

[stevewall]

Hello:

Some of what I writing has been addressed about "noise" in previous posts, but not what may be left after "cleaning up" with the neatimage program. I hope someone has the answer.

I just shot a series of available light photos in a night club at slow speed (1 second) to purposely obtain blurs of a gypsy jazz guitarist. I am using an Olympus 3030, which often usually does not give me too much of a problem, but this was quite dark and the image is very grainy/noisy.

I used a software program called "Neat Image" [www.neatimage.com/] that removed a lot of the mess, but in this case, it was not that successful and there are still many bright individual pixels still present.
Anyone have a solution to the mass removal of these tiny specs in some sort of batch process so I don’t have to individualy “spot” each one? There are too many of them on each of the photos!

I have Photoshop 6, but am far from a knowledable user. I am still at the crop, dodge, burn, adjust levels, etc., and not too far beyond. I have rarely used layers!

Thank you in advance for your wisdom and know how.
Steve

PS: perhaps I was shooting in a situation and slow shutter speed that digital cameras just can not cope with. Could this be the largest part of the problem. Ins that case, I better not sell off my sizable investment in film cameras.

[Deb]

Hi there Steve and Welcome!

The "bright individual pixels" you describe are called "hot pixels". (I'm assuming they aren't dead pixels since you state they only showed up on your recent series of dark, available light, long exposure shots.) Hot pixels typically look like bright white dots sometimes fringed with a bit of color. These can occur on long exposure shots taken with a digital camera. You may also sometimes find them in high ISO shots as well. These pixels are individual sensors on the CCD that have a higher than normal rate of charge leakage. Hot pixels differ from standard noise which looks more like anything from film grain to random dots or bits of color. This is not unusual for digital cameras.

Some digital cameras have a built-in "noise reduction" mode which reduces the appearance of these excited pixels. The default setting is usually OFF; next time, you'll want to turn it ON. But this only helps pre-processing not post-processing.  

Besides cloning out the excited pixels in post-processing, there are software filters designed to eliminate them in photo editing. One such post-processing filter is HotPixels Eliminator (http://www.mediachance.com/digicam/hotpixels.htm). I don't have first-hand experience with it but it's an example of what is available. Pixel Zap is another (http://www.tawbaware.com/pixelzap.htm). I'm sure there are lots more options.  

Hope this helps,
Deb