Deke’s Techniques 388: Smooth Away Noise with the Mean Stack Mode

388 Smoothing away noise with the Mean stack mode

In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques movie, Deke applies the Mean Stack mode command to multiple frames from a video in order to create one single photograph with drastically reduced noise.

The method involves converting frames from a noisy video clip into layers in Photoshop, then lining up those similar-but-slightly-off-due-to-being-on-a-moving-boat images using Photoshop’s Auto-Align Layers command. Next, Deke uses the Stack Mode’s Mean command to choose the average value of each pixel from each of the frames. The result is this noisy single frame (representative of the noise present in each of Deke’s fifteen contributing images)...

...becomes this delightfully smooth rendition:

Image stack set to Mean reduces the noise of the stacked layers.

And next week, Deke demonstrates how to dramatically enhance this scene to more emotionally recreate the tropical magic. Here’s a preview (actually here is the real thing):

If you’re curious about other ways to take advantage of image stacking in Photoshop, there are a couple of other Deke’s Techniques you might enjoy. In one, Deke removed "people" (OK, four copies of me and four monkey heads—-hey, it’s Deke) from the Teatro Olimpico in Vincenza, Italy. In another, he uses image stacks to toy with the tourists on the Piazza San Marco in Venice, allowing you to experience this popular tourist attraction in ways never possible in real life.

If you’re not a member of lynda.com, you can get a free 10-day trial to check out all the episodes by heading over to lynda.com/deke.

See you next week if I haven’t run back to the magical islands!

 

Next entry:Deke’s Techniques 389: Create Your Own Romantic Island Getaway

Previous entry:Introduce Yourself to the Wonders of InDesign (with Deke’s Help)

  • My Technique For Deke

    Right Click On The Layer To Convert To Smart Object (Not inside the document)

    ————————————————————————————————————

    1) It’s always available. In your movies you make people switch to a selection tool and then right click inside the document. Right clicking on the layer always provides the “Convert To Smart Object” command no matter which tool is active.

    2) You might have the wrong layer active when you right click inside the document. By teaching people to right click on the layer they are guaranteed to convert the layer they meant to.

    3) Some people remember to right click inside the document but forget they don’t have a selection tool active. Then they wonder why the command isn’t there. Right clicking on the layer always makes the command available and leads to less confusion.

    Just an FYI.

    Jim Coffey

  • 25 Ps with Deke require DivX plugin?

    Hi,

    I just wish I can watch these new videos but the plugin divX is required and it won’t work with Google Chrome 64 bits. Is there any other way we can watch you?

    Thanks,

    Lindberg

  • Lindberg, have you tried lynda.com’s site directly?

    Hi, Lindburg. The videos seem to be working on our Chrome installations around here. What happens when you try watching directly from this site?

    http://www.lynda.com/25ps/learn-something-new

    Sorry, sounds like you were solving your own issue whilst I was trying to get tags to work in our comments!

    cw

  • 25 Ps with Deke

    I had to open Safari (which is 32 bits by the way) and here you are again, at last…

    DivX plugins: why do Lynda,com still carry that format?

    Lindberg

  • 25 Ps with Deke require DivX plugin?

    Hi,

    Thank you for answering. Yes I’ve tried it and it does not seem to be working better.

    The problem is with the old ‘‘divX’’ plugin that seem’s to load automatically when I’m not logging in to my personal pages on Lynda.com. On Lynda’s pages, videos are played whether trough Flash or HTML5 by default so there’s no problem watching them, Chrome then uses Flash or HTML player.

    I was finally able to deactivate DivX completely in Chrome and then I could play all the videos correctly: this old plugin runs only in 32 bits mode and only Safari can run it correctly.

    I just wrote to Lynda’s tech about it: we should be able to login at ‘‘http://www.lynda.com/25ps/learn-something-new’’ so Chrome of FireFox would load the appropriate player instead of this older plugin so you can watch the videos without any problems. Sorry, I didn’t know better about DivX!...

    Thank you for your time,

    Lindberg

  • Thank you for your research, Lindberg.

    Thank *you* for your investigation and your sharing the results with the dekeCommunity!

    cw

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