How can I fix this noise?

[ericalynnea]

Last night I tried some long exposure shots for the first time and I discovered some annoying noise going on in some of my images.
Here is an example:


The only editing programs I have are Corel Paint Shop Pro X (old yes, but I'm a college student who borrows her father's camera and can't afford anything because of tuition) and I also have Gimp2 and UFRaw. I only recently downloaded Gimp2 and UFRaw and am very unfamiliar with them and don't really use them yet.

I did edit my pictures in Corel and I managed to get rid of the noise by using two features called Despeckle and Median filter. I tried to use despeckle first but that didn't remove all the noise so I found the feature median filter and that worked. But this feature also reduced the sharpness of my image.

I am just wondering if there is a better way to remove this noise while editing, in corel, gimp2 or UFRaw, or if anyone can suggest any other FREE program that will work.

Or perhaps it is all my error and I'm doing something wrong while taking the picture, in which case I'd like tips for that as well. I was using an olympus e500 with the 40-150mm lens.

Here is the edited version of the same photo. You can tell that the edges are soft from the use of the median filter.


thanks!

[magicfun]

It looks like you can just sample the black color and take out the speckles pretty quickly and easily with a soft brush. In the future, try taking your photo with a low ISO value, and make sure to have a tripod if you didn't already.

[corvus2606]

i'm not sure about your particular model of camera, but many on the market at the moment have a built in long exposure noise reduction function.

alternatively, if it doesn't, try taking a shot at the same settings with the lense cap on, so in effect, you get a blank exposure of the same length, but it will have the same noise (assuming its taken at b out the same time). then you can add this as a layer on top of your image, and use the layer blending modes in gimp to remove the noise (i haven't done it in a while, but it think subtract(as its called in PS) is a good place to start).

[OsmosisStudios]

Using the long exposure noise reduction or dark-frame subtraction should clear that up. Considering it's showing up in fields of pure black, though, just paint over them for now

[ericalynnea]

Thanks for the tips.