(Downloading the review while typing this, will comment on that next time I sign in.
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You may be noticing something that I accidentally discovered one winter. Bear with in this explanation.
I was snowed in for a few months, and had no net-access then. So I was frequently scanning short-wave and ham-radio frequencies looking for things that might be interesting to listen to. I had left my radio on in the living room on a station that was very noisy, but they were saying interesting things. I had to go make supper in the kitchen. I turned up the radio volume so I could hear it in the other room while working. Also increasing the noise level.
It was almost impossible to make out what was being said, but no matter, I was busy. Then I realized I needed to put more wood on the fire, so I cranked up the fire and turned on the forced-air heater that I made for my wood-burning stove. I went back into the kitchen to cook.
WEIRD!! The noise from the fan now made the sound from the radio clean and understandable. I experimented and turned off the fan again. I could hardly understand what was being said from the other room. I turned the fan on again. I could understand what was being said. It wasn't the motor from the fan cleaning up the electrical radio signal. The audio noise from that signal was just as pronounced as ever when I'd go into the living-room to hear it. It was only by hearing that radio station THROUGH the audio noise of the fan (walking past it and away, so the noise from the fan was between me and the radio, adding that noise into the radio noise), that the audio signal was now understandable.
I've since discovered this unique psychological phenomenon applies visually too. If you introduce a KNOWN and constant noise signal, the mind is able to add that into the noise from the source, and you can perceive more useful data out of that original signal.
Try it sometime on some funky noisy photos. Add some known noise using any of the filters for that purpose. The image will become more noisy, but the original noise disappears in that new noise. The details in the image become easier to see.
If people weren't so picayune about having clean images all the time and adamant about making sure every pixel in an image was clean, I would use this "add noise to remove noise" more often in my photography because it's so amazingly effective. It's much easier to add a known noise to clean up the perception of details in an image than try to remove noise and losing details in the process.
Hopefully, by mentioning this, and sharing my findings, it might become a more common practice and an acceptable way of displaying some exceptional photography that could be ruined by using traditional noise-removal methods. I'm an available-light photography addict. Noise is my nemesis. Any way that I can find to reduce the perception of it and find ways to make the detail more perceptible is a huge plus in my world.
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