Procrastination is a wonderful thing. For year’s I’ve intended to purge my digital photo library of underexposed, noisy photographs. You probably have them too: mottled with greens and purples, you know there but for an extra F stop or so, you might have had a great photo. Anyway, only laziness and a certain sense of regret has kept me from getting rid of those flawed photos. The Akvis Noisebuster Photoshop Plugin has arrived, and not a moment to soon to rescue these doomed images!
Rejoice! Here comes the amazing Noise Buster from Akvis ($49). Noise Buster achieves nearly unimaginable results, vacuuming away the garbage and leaving you with the image you thought you had in the first place. At fifty dollars it is an expensive utility, but this one is fully worth it.
Using this plug-in for Photoshop is painless. Launched from within Photoshop, as a filter, the automatic mode (shown here, click to enlarge) displays a box that shows a preview of the noise being busted in context. Notice how the noise is virtually banished from within the bounded area. 
That is the way the entire image will be treated when you process it with the filter. You can drag the box around the image to make sure you're not deleting significant detail. The automatic mode solved most problem photos I threw at it without further input from me. Advanced manual adjustments can be made through a series of well labeled sliders that control the amount of change in several categories: Luminace Noise, Color Noise, Blur and Sharpen Edges. The effects are immediately visible on screen. The program shows a square patch of altered photo superimposed on the unaltered photo. When you have the desired strength of cleaning dialed in, just hit the “go” button and the “restored” photo is presented in Photoshop.
Now I don’t have to delete those underexposed pictures – I can make them look just they way I thought I had shot them!
