Modern smartphones come with great cameras which generally deliver good results, but of course they can’t change the photographic basics: if there’s not enough light then your pictures are going to ruined by noise.

Photo Noise Reducer Pro is a free-for-personal-use Android app which provides various ways to denoise, smooth and generally clean up your images.

The app works with images in your gallery, but you can also use the Camera function to take a picture and denoise it right away.

Once you’re viewing a source image, tapping either “Light” or “Medium” applies a preset smoothing level, or you can choose “Custom” and use a slider to select whatever intensity you need.

Apply preset denoising with a tap, or drag a slider to customise the effect

A separate slider applies a smoothing filter to clean up any remaining issues.

Has it helped? Zoom in on an important area, and you’re able to quickly switch between the original and denoised images to see how they compare.

The results you’ll see will depend very much on your source material.The presets sometimes deliver more “smoothing” than you’d expect (“Light” didn’t always seem Light at all), but there’s always the Custom option, it generally worked well for us, and a current Google Play rating of 4.5 stars suggests more people are happy.

Smoothing and noise reduction can also have an interesting side effect, drastically cutting the size of your image files without necessarily losing as much quality.

Photo Noise Reducer Pro is available now for Android, but if you’re interested, don’t wait: the developer says it’s only free for a “limited time”.