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The Spatial NR controls let you smooth out regions of high-frequency noise throughout the image, while attempting to avoid softening by preserving detail. It’s effective for reducing noise that Temporal NR can’t.
— Mode: The Mode drop-down menu lets you switch Spatial NR between three different algorithms. All three modes of operation use the same controls, so you can switch between modes using the same settings to compare your results.
— Faster: Uses a computationally lightweight method of noise reduction that’s good at lower settings, but may produce artifacts when applied at higher values.
— Better: Switches the Spatial NR controls to use a higher quality algorithm that produces greatly superior results to Faster, at the expense of being more processor intensive to render and not allowing you to decouple the Luma and Chroma Threshold sliders for individual adjustments to each color component.
— Enhanced: Does a significantly better job preserving image sharpness and detail when raising the Spatial Threshold sliders to eliminate noise. This improvement is particularly apparent when the Spatial Threshold sliders are raised to high values (what constitutes “high” varies with the image you’re working on). At lower values, the improvement may be more subtle when compared to the “Better” mode, which is less processor intensive than the
computationally expensive “Enhanced” setting. Additionally, “Enhanced” lets you decouple the Luma and Chroma threshold sliders so you can add different noise reduction amounts to each color component, as the image requires.
— Radius: Options include Large, Medium, and Small. A smaller radius offers greater real-time performance and can provide good quality when using low Luma and Chroma Threshold values. However, you may see more aliasing in regions of detail when using low NR Threshold values.
Setting Radius to be progressively larger results in higher quality within areas of greater visual detail at high Luma and Chroma Threshold values, at the expense of slower performance.
An NR Radius of Medium should provide suitable quality for most images when using medium NR Threshold settings. As with many operations, there’s an adjustable tradeoff between quality and speed.
Spatial Threshold Controls
The Spatial Threshold parameters allow you to control which image characteristics get more or less noise reduction.
— Luma: Lets you determine how much or how little noise reduction to apply to the luma component of the image. The range is 0–100, where 0 applies no noise reduction at all, and 100 is the maximum amount. Too high a setting may eliminate fine detail from the image.
— Chroma: Lets you determine how much or how little noise reduction to apply to the chroma component of the image by smoothing out regions of high-frequency noise while attempting to preserve the sharpness of significant edge details. The range is 0–100, where 0 applies no noise reduction at all, and 100 is the maximum amount. Too high a setting may eliminate fine color detail from the image. However, you may find you can raise the Chroma Threshold higher than the Luma Threshold with less noticeable artifacting.