The p-Code Machine

We all know quite well that in general phone camera’s suck. The cheaper phone’s usually have completely unusable camera functionality and the more expensive ones sometimes have bearable camera functionality. In practically all cases, they have significant noise. Effectively getting rid of that noise makes a phone camera that more useful. While experimenting a bit with GIMP, I noticed just about any denoising method destroyed detail and did not effectively deal with the noise in my images. Until I tried something different… Despeckle:

Open up your noisy phone camera image in GIMP, then go to Filters, Enhance, Despeckle… And obviously the Despeckle dialog turns up… Enable the adaptive median (but leave recursion off). Set the radius to 1, and leave the black and white levels at their defaults (respectively 7 & 248), and behold the results: