Is there a "denoise brush" ?

[pontiac1940]

Is there a way to denoise small areas with a "denoise brush" ?
I had a photo and would have liked to use a brush to denoise some small areas. I have already fixed what I wanted, but thought if I could blow up the photo and carefully paint a few small areas. 

I vaguely recall this being discussed in the past few months and am unable to find it. 

Thanks, 

Clive 

[fotofrank]

There is a way as long as you are using the full version of Photoshop or Lightroom. The Masking tools allow you to apply noise reduction to any masking tool. Masking/Brushing in, is also available in Topaz Denoise.

[pontiac1940]

Thanks Frank. I do not have LR or full PS.  

I am generally okay at denoising. I sometimes shoot in low light and sometimes the backgrounds can be noisy. The chickadee photo was shot at ISO 8,000. (Just because I can. ) It is not the best. The plain background showed too much noise. So I isolated the bird and probably the twig, refined the edge, reversed and denoised the background. Generally this works fine. However, sometimes I'd like to do noise  touch ups around the fuzzy edges...feathers and fur. One weakness of the Quick Selection tools are they are imprecise on fuzzy edges.  

Make sense? 

[Andrei Doubrovski]

Clive,
PSE supports the masking too.

- Duplicate the (untouched) Background layer [Ctrl+J]
- Denoise the whole copied layer
- Add a "black" mask (Layer > Layer Mask > Hide All)
- Activate the Brush tool
- Paint on the image with white(!) color
to reveal the denoised areas.

[pontiac1940]

Jan 18, 2023 4:27:34 GMT Andrei Doubrovski said:

PSE supports the masking too.

Thank you Andrei!

I have used masking a bit but had never thought of this. I am on the road for 3 days so will try this next weekend! 

Had a quick go on a photo I took today. There was a lot going in here, not just noise. The grain straw was side-lighted and glary and there was some heat distortion. So it was messy. Instead of denoising I could have lightly blurred the images. 
 
I did exactly what you said and it worked great! Below are after and before photos. I did this in a few minutes so was not precise. The result is most satisfactory and more accurate than playing with the Quick Selection tools. 

Thank you.  

Clive 

Not a great starting image but good for this test. The antelope are not crisp to begin with. If you click and view the large versions of each there is a marked improvement in the background.
Pronghorn antelope photographed January 17, 2023 about 12 km from my home. 
  

[Lillias]

It’s good to have confirmation that my old grey cells are still working to some extent at least. I say this because the way Andrei advised to tackle this is the way that I thought about when first I read your question this morning Clive.

I love masking. It opens up doors to what you can do with your images that you may not have thought possible. It’s well worth learning and Jai Johnson’s videos teach a lot which you might find useful. She uses an old software no longer available but they are easily understandable and work for me using PSE too.

They can be found here if you are interested...
Jai Johnson videos

[pontiac1940]

Jan 18, 2023 11:00:04 GMT Lillias said:

It’s well worth learning and Jai Johnson’s videos teach a lot which you might find useful.

Thank you Lillias. Will look when I get back on Saturday.