The selection isn’t perfect, but it should work really well to begin blending the artifacts with the blacks a little more. Using only the Saturation and Luminance qualifiers, I am targeting the blocky regions of the image. Now that I’m a little happier with the exposure of our actor, I’m navigating to the HSL/Secondary panel in Lumetri. (I’m ignoring the fact that I’m clearly destroying our footage for right now.) I’ve made a few adjustments to begin bringing the levels up in the shot. We’re going to work to keep the shot looking the same or a little better without completely breaking the footage. This shot is suffering from heavy compression due to the fast motion in the dance scene and the fine detail of the film grain irritating the codec used to upload the short to the internet.

Moving on to the next shot in the dream sequence - this time we’re up close.

We have effectively killed the fluttering color noise in this shot while bringing our black levels back down to more natural levels. I will also adjust the color to make the chroma noise appear a little more like luminance noise by warming the temperature up and shifting the hue all the way to green. Now I’m selecting the blacks with a luminance qualifier and applying adjustments to pull the brighter noisy sections down. I’ve blurred the selection a bit to blend the selected region with the un-selected regions of the frame a little more. From here, I am reducing the vibrance in the Creative panel before moving to the HSL/Secondary panel. What I’m attempting here is to increase the contrast to pop the shot a little bit and then bring up the blacks to wash out the actual recorded blacks to get them to a similar brightness level as the noise we want to get rid of.Īfter we’ve brought the blacks up, I am adding an adjustment layer over the shot to bring the blacks back down to a more reasonable level. As you can see, the film grain has really irritated the codec used to upload this video to the internet, and we’ve got some super-distracting noise in all of the channels - high, medium, and low.īecause this shot is super high-contrast, hiding the noise in the blacks should be no problem. Here is a still from a dream sequence in a short I shot on super 16mm several years ago. Today, we are looking at some quick and effective noise reduction tricks to use in any program - without a noise reduction plugin. We’ve gone in-depth on the causes of noise and methods for reducing noise in footage a few times before. Need to clean up some noise in your footage, fast, but you don’t have any plugins on hand? We’ve got you covered with this technique.

Video noise reduction plugin