Reducing Noise in Phantom 4 Drone Night Photos
If you’ve used DJI’s Phantom 4, you know that the camera produces surprisingly good quality photos. The 12 megapixel f/2.8 camera even does a good job with night shots. However, at ISO 1600 for 1/3s you’re bound to end up with some noise:
Luckily, there’s a very quick process to dramatically reduce the noise:
The darker parts of the sky and the light reflecting on the water are noticeably less noisy. The process used here is called image stacking. Essentially you blend together many different photos of the same shot, and the noise is subtracted out through averaging.
Phantom 4 Camera Setup
The Phantom 4 has a 7-image burst mode that is perfect for image stacking.
Capture DNG raw images instead of JPEG.
The camera should automatically open the aperture to f/2.8 and adjust the ISO to 1600. Based on the lighting, your shutter speed will vary.
Image Stacking with Photoshop
- Open each DNG as a separate layer in Photoshop.
- Select all seven layers in Layers.
- Edit Menu » Auto-Align Layers
- Layer Menu » Smart Object » Convert to Smart Object. This may take a moment.
- Zoom in to 200% to better see the noise before it’s reduced.
- Layer Menu » Smart Object » Stack Mode » Median. This may take a moment.
- Export the image in your preferred format.
This is a simplified version of how you stack images for astrophotography. If you’d like to learn more, check out this video tutorial:
