Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Noise Reducers

If you’ve taken a photo in low light or if you set your camera to a high ISO (a setting that increases its sensitivity to light), chances are the image has a ton of noise—grainy-looking speckles—in it. While you’ll find a couple of noise-reducing tricks in Chapter 12, if the image is really important, you can spring for one of these noise-reducing plug-ins instead.

TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT: Disabling Plug-Ins

If Photoshop starts acting weird after you install a plug-in, you can temporarily disable that plug-in to see if it’s the culprit by locating it on your hard drive and adding a tilde (~) to the beginning of its file name. Some manufacturers nest their plug-ins inside yet another folder; for example, you’ll find a folder called Mask Pro inside your Plug-Ins folder. In that case, you can put the tilde to the beginning of the folder’s name to disable everything inside it. Either way, adding the tilde means the plug-in won’t load the next time you launch Photoshop. When you want the plug-in to load again, just delete the tilde and relaunch Photoshop.

You can also get Photoshop to temporarily disable all plug-ins (great for narrowing down why the program might be acting strange). Simply press and hold the Shift key when you launch Photoshop and you’ll see a dialog box asking if you’d like to “Skip loading optional and third-party plug-ins” (that is, anything installed in the Adobe Photoshop CC→Plug-Ins folder). Your choices are Yes and No (you don’t get to pick and choose ...