Reduce image noise

Clean up low-light grain and colour speckle, keeping the texture.

Drop an image here or click to choose files You can also paste an image with Ctrl+V

How this works

  • It measures your photo first — the histogram, the colour cast, how much is crushed to black or blown to white, how much noise there is and how crisp the edges are. The starting settings come from those readings, not from a preset everything gets.
  • Nothing is uploaded — the whole thing runs in your browser, including the full-resolution version you download. Your photo never leaves the device.
  • It can’t invent detail — a badly out-of-focus or heavily compressed photo has lost information, and no amount of sharpening brings it back. This fixes exposure, colour and contrast, which is what most photos actually need.

Noise from a phone camera comes in two kinds, and they need opposite treatment. Colour noise — the red and green speckle in dark areas — can be smoothed away hard, because a photograph contains very little genuine fine colour detail. Brightness noise carries real texture, and smoothing it is how a face ends up looking like plastic.

So they are handled separately. The colour channels get a straightforward blur. The brightness channel gets an edge-preserving average instead: each pixel is averaged only with neighbours of a similar brightness, which flattens a noisy wall while leaving an eyelash or a hair intact.

Even at maximum, some of the original texture is deliberately blended back in. A completely denoised photo looks worse than a slightly noisy one, and it is a look that cannot be undone.

How to use it

  1. Drop in the noisy photo.
  2. The amount is set from a measurement of the noise, not guessed.
  3. Compare at full size — noise reduction is judged on detail, not on the thumbnail.
  4. Adjust and download.

Frequently asked questions

The photo looks smooth but soft now.

That is the trade, and it is unavoidable: noise and fine detail occupy the same scale, so no filter can remove one without touching the other. Reduce the amount, then add a little Sharpen on the sharpen page to put the edges back.

Why did it leave some grain?

On purpose. Removing it completely produces the waxy, plastic look that makes a photo obviously processed, and unlike noise it cannot be undone afterwards.

Is this better than my phone’s night mode?

No. Night mode combines several exposures before the noise exists, which is far more effective than removing it afterwards. Use this on a photo you already have.

It did almost nothing.

Then it measured very little noise — the amount is set from the image rather than applied blindly. Raise the Reduce noise slider if you disagree.

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