Noise Reduction Online

Noise is what a camera adds when there is not enough light to go round. Push the ISO up and the sensor amplifies its own uncertainty along with the picture, so a photo that should be smooth comes back speckled — fine grain in the brightness, and softer coloured patches sitting underneath it. Reducing that noise is what makes a low-light photo printable, croppable and worth keeping.

What noise reduction gives you

• Usable low-light shots: an evening or indoor photo stops looking like a mistake.
• Room to crop: noise is the first thing that shows when you enlarge part of a frame.
• Cleaner prints: grain that is invisible on a phone screen is obvious at A4.
• Smaller files: noise is random, and random data is the hardest thing for any format to compress.
• A better starting point: sharpening a noisy photo amplifies the noise; denoising first avoids that.

1. 1Add your photo: Drop in the noisy photo. It is read on your device — nothing is uploaded. JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, BMP, GIF are accepted.
2. 2Let it measure the noise: The tool reads the photo's own noise level and shows it. Press Match this photo to set every slider from that measurement.
3. 3Balance luminance and colour: Raise Colour first — colour blotches go with almost no cost to detail. Then raise Luminance only as far as the grain needs.
4. 4Protect the detail: Raise Detail to bring back texture that was too strong to have been noise. Switch to Removed noise to check nothing recognisable is being lost.
5. 5Save the result: Compare before and after, then export as PNG, JPEG or WebP. With Pro, process a batch and download everything as one ZIP.

Noise is not one thing, so one filter cannot be right for all of it. Each method here exists because there is a kind of damage it handles better than the others, and the tool says which is which rather than leaving you to guess.

• Photographic: the default, and the right answer for ordinary camera noise. It separates the picture into scales, from single pixels up to patches sixty pixels across, and removes the noise living at each of them. That reach is what lets it clear the soft coloured blotches a small filter cannot even see.
• Detail-preserving: for photos where texture matters more than speed — fabric, hair, foliage, skin. Instead of averaging a pixel with its neighbours, it finds other places in the image that look like the pixel's surroundings and averages those. Similar-looking regions share the picture but not the noise, so the noise cancels and the texture does not.
• Speckle: for dust, scratches, hot pixels and scanner specks — isolated wrong pixels rather than a general grain. It only touches pixels that disagree with all of their neighbours, so everything that fits its surroundings is left completely alone.

Every noisy photo carries two different problems. Luminance noise is the fine grain in brightness: it is what you notice first, and it is also where the picture's real texture lives, so removing too much of it is what produces the waxy, plastic look people complain about. Colour noise is the soft green and magenta patches underneath — larger, blurrier, and carrying almost nothing you would recognise as detail.

Because they behave so differently, they get separate sliders here. Colour can usually be pushed hard: the blotches disappear and almost no detail goes with them, since a viewer cannot resolve fine colour information anyway. Luminance is where restraint pays — raise it only as far as the grain actually needs, and use Detail to keep the texture that survives. A single combined strength slider forces one compromise on both, which is why the tool this replaces could never clear colour noise without also flattening the photo.

A threshold that works on a grainy night shot is far above every pixel of a clean daylight one. So the strength controls here are not absolute amounts — the tool reads the noise level of the photo you gave it, and each slider is a multiple of that reading. Fifty means the same thing on both photos: a moderate amount of the noise that is actually present.

The measurement is shown next to the preview, in levels, so you can see what the tool decided before you touch anything. Press Match this photo and every slider moves to a sensible starting point for that specific image. A photo with no measurable noise is reported as already clean rather than quietly filtered anyway.

Every denoiser faces the same problem: fine texture and fine noise look alike from close up. The Detail control is how this one tells them apart. Content that was removed but is far stronger than the measured noise floor could not have been noise, so it is put back; content at or below that floor stays gone. Raising Detail therefore recovers texture without letting grain return, which is the distinction that makes it worth having.

The Removed noise view is the check on all of it. It shows exactly what the tool took out, amplified so faint grain is visible. Ideally it looks like static. If you can make out edges, hair or lettering in it, those are details being removed — lower Luminance, raise Detail, and look again. No competing tool shows you this, and it is the fastest way to know you have gone too far.

The settings that work depend on what caused the noise in the first place.

• High-ISO and night photography: the case this tool is built around. Push Colour to clear the blotches, keep Luminance moderate, and add a little Sharpen after to recover the bite that denoising costs.
• Portraits: skin shows over-processing faster than anything else. Use Detail-preserving with a high Detail setting so pores and hair survive while the grain goes.
• Scanned photos and film: dust and scratches are isolated wrong pixels, not grain. Speckle repairs them without touching the rest of the picture.
• Screenshots and compressed images: blocky colour artefacts respond well to a high Colour setting with Luminance left low.
• Before enlarging or sharpening: both operations amplify whatever noise is present, so denoising first changes the result of everything that follows.

Everything is read and written on your device, so what the tool accepts is what your browser can decode. Where something cannot be supported, it is said here rather than discovered in the download.

• Reads: JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, BMP and GIF.
• Writes: PNG for lossless results, JPEG and WebP with a quality control.
• Transparency: kept exactly. Transparent areas are excluded from the filter rather than blended into it, so an alpha edge is neither eroded nor darkened.
• Animated files: an animated GIF or WebP has its first frame denoised and comes back as a still image. The tool says so when you add one.
• Rotation: a phone photo that stores its orientation as a tag is read the way it is meant to be displayed, so the export is never sideways.
• Sizes: one image up to 25 MB on the free plan, exported up to 4096 px on the long edge. Pro exports at full resolution and processes batches.

Your photo is opened, measured, filtered and saved on your own device. There is no upload, no queue and no copy on a server, which means there is nothing to delete afterwards and no waiting for a file to travel twice. It also means a large photo is limited by your device rather than by an account tier, and that the tool works exactly the same on a slow connection or none at all.

• Sharpen Image

  Restore crispness with edge masking and halo control.

• Image Enhancer

  Automatic exposure, colour and detail in one pass.

• Blur Image

  Deliberate blur, for backgrounds and depth effects.

• Compress Image

  Shrink a photo before uploading it anywhere.