Noise Reductiontechnical
Smoothing out the speckled grain from high ISO — in-camera for JPEGs, or far better in editing.
High-ISO shots get noisy; noise reduction smooths it. In-camera NR affects JPEGs (and can smear fine detail if heavy). Shooting RAW lets you apply smarter NR later — modern AI denoise tools recover remarkably clean results from very noisy files, which has made high ISO far more usable.
Use this when
- High-ISO RAW files: denoise in software (AI tools excel)
Common mistake: Over-smoothing until skin and feathers turn to plastic.