Dont Delete Noisy Photos Edit Them Like This

TITLE: Don’t Delete Noisy Photos — Edit Them Like This CHANNEL: Matt Shannon DATE: 2026-04-11 ---TRANSCRIPT--- In this episode, I’m taking extremely high ISO images and making them look incredible, professional, sharp, and without noise. I was out last week photographing hummingbirds, and it was rainy, dark, and there was a lot of movement. And so, with wildlife photography, you might have to crank the ISO. Now, if you missed that episode and you want to know why I chose the settings that I chose, I’ll put a link down in the description so you can watch that later. There’s a lot to go over, so let’s get started. If you are new to this channel, my name is Matt Shannon and I a full-time photographer in beautiful British Columbia. Whether you’re here to learn, be inspired, or simply enjoy some stunning visuals, you’ve come to the right place. Subscribe to my channel if you want to see more videos like this. So, I’m going to go through this very quickly just because there’s a lot of images that are all at different ISO extremes, and I feel like it’s important to see the difference in either uh loss or recovery that we can do. I’m going to start in Lightroom, but later on, if you hold with me, we’re going to try a different program that doesn’t require you to pay a subscription because people hate subscriptions these days. So, the first image is taken at ISO 6400. And I think for a lot of us, this might be like the max or getting close to the max ISO that we would want before we kind of pack everything up and call it a day. When we zoom in, we can see a lot of detail in this malard, but again, there’s that that noise that that is the issue. So, there’s plenty of programs that you can use for removing noise and adding sharpening. And the best one by far is DxO, Pure RAW 6. Now, I’ve been using it since Puraw 4. And I actually reached out to DxO asking them if they wanted to sponsor this video and uh so happy that they did cuz their program is amazing. I’m going to show you how how good it is. Now, the first thing that we can do is edit it in Pure Raw 6 right now by going to export and over to preview and process with Pure Raw 6. You can also go to file down to export with preset and you’ll see it there as well. It takes the raw image and works on that. So, if I make any changes like the shadows and exposure or saturation, I’m gonna have to apply that all again after I’m done in DxO. So, just remember that it takes the raw image. So, if you do any adjustments here, you’ll just have to copy and paste them onto the new file that we’re going to get after we import it and export it in DxO. So, here’s Pure Raw 6. It’s a fairly straightforward program where we have our our zoom in and our different previews up at the top here that we can select. I actually like the the little slider that we can move back and forth. So, now that we’re zoomed in here, I can already see the changes that it automatically applied. Up at the top, we have presets, and then we have our processing and D noiseis. Now, if you’re unfamiliar with how or what these programs do from one another, you can go over to the question mark here and it’ll tell you exactly what one does. So, I like using D prime XD3 when we’re dealing with extremely high ISO. If you don’t have really high ISO, like ISO 10,000, uh then just the D prime 3 will be totally fine. Then we have our luminance and force details. uh luminance will remove that that fuzz that that noise that we see in the background and you might not need to bring it all the way up to 100%. Uh because it’s overkill, you know, and you might lose some of the details in the feathers. So, I think I have it around like 50 or whatever. If we do it zero, obviously you could see that it removes the digital color noise that we have that we really don’t want. Uh but you still have noise in the in the image. So somewhere around the 40 50% mark and it already looks really really good. And then we have our force details. If you go up to 100% it’s still not that bad. It’s It’s not like other programs where you need to have a light hand or else you’ll do some really nasty changes. Then we go down to the optical corrections. So we have lens sharpness and you can just pick, you know, soft, standard, strong, and that’s going to be the same correlation as as it is with the the slider here. So if we go to soft, it’ll pick only plus 75. If we go to strong, cranks it up to 150. I like using it around the standard. Looks great. Looks great on the feathers, the details, you name it. Look at that detail. Absolutely incredible. Zoomed in 600% here. So, once we’re done, we can hit process. And another cool feature that DxO has is that you can actually process a whole catalog of images. So, if you’re a wedding photographer or if you’re a wildlife photographer that shoots, you know, burst of wildlife, you can just highlight them all and then rightclick and edit them all in Pure Raw 6. Now, once I do one or two of them, I don’t typically go back to previewing and processing. I just export it and just uh process with the last settings that I’ve done or create a preset. So if we go back into Lightroom here, when we rightclick on our image and we go into the export, we can just go process directly using last settings in DxO Pure Raw 6. That way it saves you time. All right, now that we have our image here, this is when we can focus on shadows. We can bring up the shadows, exposure, add some contrast, bring some vibrance back in. Highlights bring down whites. Already looking amazing, but I want to crop right in. And we need to correct our level. Now, I do love using some vignetting, bringing the midpoints in, feather out the details. I can select the duck. I’m selecting our subjects here. And then I can add a little bit more texture, maybe some clarity. And right there, that looks incredible. Now, another thing that I really enjoy doing with uh you know, ducks, waterfall on water is darkening the foreground to kind of like pull you in a little bit. So, I’ll add a linear gradient here. or pull up from the bottom. And then just bring down the exposure, maybe up some of the contrast. And then it looks like there is light coming from, you know, the the back face side of this malard. You can see from the bill here, it’s a bit bright. So, we can also go plus radial gradient. And then I can bring up the exposure here. Bring down some of the highlights. And I’m going to go down to dehaze. Maybe give it a bit more of a softer glow. Warm up that lighting. I like that. And then I’m going to darken the backside of of the duck so that there’s a little bit of a light source coming in, which which there is. It’s it’s a bit of a gray day here. I’m going to bring down the intensity of that. So, I’m going to have another linear gradient here on the back side. And then I might darken that a little bit. It just gives us some mood and some depth to the image. Adding some darkness in behind a light source maybe in front. Softening it. Softening that light. Uh and then adding some darkness to the water there. Gives some depth so that the the malard really pops. It stands out. So that is what I love about DxO. the details that we see up into the eyes and stuff here is is absolutely incredible. Now, let’s try something that’s a little bit more challenging. Higher ISO. All right, this image was captured at 10,000 ISO. And if we zoom in, it really needs some help here. So, the before and after. Absolutely incredible. There is falling snow, but there’s also a lot of water that’s being sprayed everywhere. We’ll wait for it to render. Look at that. And not creating any artifacts. You know, the wings are out of focus and soft. They’re not being, you know, forced or oversharpened. So, absolutely love this. Does an incredible job. We’re going to hit process now. Okay. This next one is taken on a micro four thirds camera. DxO will take lenses and camera bodies and create profiles for each one. So DxO recognizes that I have the OM1 Mark II camera body paired with a 100 to 400 lens. So I’m going to download this right now. And if they they haven’t gotten every lens, you can actually um submit your your lens or a request for them to use their that lens in their lab. And so if I am using a lens that is soft around the edges, this program will compensate for my specific lens. So it’s not just a program that just one fits for all. It’s very very specific to the gear you’re using. There is a lot a lot of noise here. That is incredible. Look at the feathers here in the water. Now, I’m zoomed in quite a bit and the water droplets and the snow on the back. Wow. Let it process. All right. Now, we’re going to take an image captured at 25,600 ISO. And look at that difference. And let’s look at pure D prime 3 and D prime XD3. Can you see there is a slight difference between the two D prime 3? It’s a little bit noisier and the XD3 sharpens things up a little bit. That’s basically it. So, not a huge difference. when we’re dealing with really high ISO, I would put it in the XD3, but the D prime 3 works really fast, especially if you’re batching a bunch of images together and uh your your workflow is pretty heavy. Now, it’s important to remember that DxO helps enhance the images capture correctly in the field. So, if you took an image that was too slow and you had some motion blur and you didn’t want it to be blurry, uh, DxO is not really going to help you correct a mistake that you did in the field. What it’ll do best at is removing noise and adding sharpening where it should to an already correct image. Now, a lot of people ask me, is there an alternative to Lightroom? There is an alternative and that is from DxO. It is Photo Lab 9. I think they’re at 9.6. So, if you’ve bought the 9 and you haven’t upgraded to the 9.6, you should do that. Uh, this is a great alternative. Now, the layout is a bit different. When you go to your photo library to to choose your images, you don’t import them into a catalog. You just find them wherever they are in your hard drives, external hard drives, and you can start working on them. So, you select your image, pops up. The top is nicely laid out for all your zoom. You can crop. You got uh your leveling tools. And then on the right hand side is all of our adjustments and exposure, coloring. We can even go to uh selection and you can pinpoint your subjects or even just various shapes throughout your image. And honestly, they did a better job in my opinion than Lightroom. Sometimes when you say, you know, select the subject, it doesn’t do a fantastic job. So, another amazing thing that they’ve incorporated is highfidelity compression, which allows you to export DNG files that are up to four times smaller while maintaining your raw image quality. So, this is huge. If you have a lot of photos like I do and storage space is becoming more and more expensive, you can use this highfidelity compression and basically shrink all your images. So, if you want these programs, I have a 15% discount code. It is my name, Matt Shannon. I’ve got links down in the description to get you to the program, see what it’s all about, and use that discount code cuz I think you’re going to love what these can do to your photos. A huge thank you to DxO for sponsoring this week’s video. Thank you so much for watching. Subscribe if you aren’t subscribed and I hope to see you on the next episode. Ciao.