For the past 4 years I have spent hundreds of hours researching methods to reduce noise from digital camera images. The key to noise reduction is to reduce or eliminate the noise without deteriorating other aspects of the image. Many freeware and even paid solutions negatively affect image sharpness, introduce wavy patterns in uniform surfaces and/or make them look "too uniform" (a bit like in a water painting).

These crops below out of a prosumer image illustrates the problem of edge sharpness and wavy patterns typical to a lot of noise reduction methods and compares the results with methods described in my e-book. The results are shown both for the color image and in the red channel. The areas indicated by the red squares are 4 times enlarged in the row below. On some monitors, the noise may not be very visible in the original. In that case, look at the red channel crops instead.