Translated literally, Ekki Múkk is Icelandic for “no seagulls.” Colloquially, it means “not a peep” or “not a sound” or, as I’m about to use it, “no noise.”

Night time and northern lights shoots are full of possibilities, and one of these is noisy pictures, especially with older digital cameras like my Nikon D200 or D300. Fortunately, I now have a D810 so my noise concerns have been greatly reduced. But I still use my D300 and that means I’ll likely need to use some noise reductions.

There are some pretty good noise reduction utilities available. The first that comes to mind is Lightroom’s built-in noise reduction. You can find it in the Develop Module under the Details control pane. It’s pretty straightforward, just a couple of sliders: one for Luminance Noise and one for Color Noise. The thing to remember is that if you apply too much Luminance Noise reduction you’ll give your pictures a slight blur. Color Noise reduction doesn’t affect details nearly as much. Unfortunately, much of our high-ISO noise problems will be coming from Luminance Noise. So use that slider judiciously.

The advantage of applying noise reduction in Lightroom is that you can apply noise reduction to one image and then sync up those settings to other images. So you could sort on all images at a certain ISO, apply noise reduction to one, and sync the settings to all the others. Definitely a time saver.

But if Lightroom’s noise reduction isn’t going to cut it, there are a few really good options. I’ll list three of them. I’ve only got any recent experience with one of them but they all come highly recommended and have favorable reviews:

Noiseware by Imagenomic. I’ve used this and like it.

Dfine by NIK (Google). All of the NIK plugins are good. I used this years ago and it worked great then. I’m sure it still does. I actually have this but have not tested it yet. If you want to get it, you can use my NIK discount code (RBARBEE) for 15% off.

Noise Ninja. I’ve no experience with Noise Ninja but I’ve heard good things about it.

So the bottom line is that you may want to pick up one of these utilities for processing your high ISO night images. If you’ve got one you like, please let us know in the Comments section below.