Noise Shampoo 3 is an edge-preserving smoothing filter. It can be used to reduce noise on pictures, or to simplify them.

• Changelog:
• version 2: new algorithm variation, that leads to more photo realistic results. You can now select a separate clean strength for chroma & luminosity. Speed improvement (multithreading) , and improved memory usage.
• version 3: implicitly comes with a fourth algorithm. But now algorithms are presented differently, you have instead two"quality tweaks", which leads to four combinations. The "Anti Edge Loss" setting was dropped.

Example 1: Here we applied to a picture a clean setting of 70, and then we tried all the "Quality Tweaks" combinations.

Original		Both Tweaks		Vibrant Surfaces
		Solid Edges		No Tweaks

Example 2: With both "Quality Tweaks" enabled, it can be tempting to use the plugin, as a simplification effect. Here the clean setting was set to maximum.

Before		After

Example 3: To remove color artefacts from pictures circulating on the web, often you have to take a close look. We zoomed a picture 4x, in the following example. Here, the luminosity denoising strength was set to 50 , and the chroma denoising strength set relatively ( 1x = 50, 2x=100, 3x=150). With a strength of 1x , lot of color artefacts remain, while with a strength of 3x the "orange hair" might look a bit desaturated.

Original Image		Chroma 1x
Chroma 2x		Chroma 3x

Remark: To overcome the zoom limitations of this plugin, Windows 7 offers a convenient tool. Press the Windows logo key + Plus Sign. This will zoom in, the full screen.

• Description of controls:
• Clean: This slider control by default the strength, of luminosity denoising. The higher this setting is, the more surfaces are smoothed. You have to tweak the setting in order to avoid too much loss of details.
• Range for clean: By pressing the little arrow near clean slider , you can change the range.
• Chroma: Same as Clean setting, but for the Chroma.
• Range for chroma: Use again the little arrow near chroma slider. However the range of chroma is relative to the clean range. 1x for same range, 2x for twice, and so on ...
• Disable slider: To save time, the chroma denoising strength can be automatically set relatively to main clean setting and depending of the chroma Range too: 1x for same strength as clean, 2x for twice the strength and so on... The default strength of 1.5x seems good for general use.
• Quality Tweaks: The "Vibrant Surfaces" tweak, helps to keep an eye pleasing aspect for photos. One explanation is that local contrast is better preserved. You can disable it on graphics, if you want surfaces to be more flat. The "Solid Edge" tweak helps to keep the most obvious edges, well defined, even at extreme clean settings. It might induce slight aliasing.
• Uniform Color Space: This option was introduced to fix occasional discrepancy between what you see and what you get i.e for instance why some colors that doesn't look similar are more smoothed than colors that looks similar ? Most of the times it's better to keep this option checked. Note: this option assume that you use sRGB as your default color profile in Photoshop.
• Second Wash: This option can help to mitigate some artefacts such like vertical/horizontal streaks, that appears after denoising noisy backgrounds. It's rare that this option is useful or that you can see any difference. It adds a big additional processing time.
• Lessen Bit Precision: An option for nitpicking. Check if you want to save some RAM. No perceptual impact, and an insignificant difference in computed values.

See also: Flat Median.

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