Houston's Fire

@Ron: Hey Ron,
I use Apple's Aperture to process my images, but the technique I use could be replicated on just about any software- I actually had horrendous noise in this image, but I raised the black point, meaning, I redefined levels that previously would've shown up as gray or very dark pixels as complete black. This turned those grayish noise pixels completely black. The fire was bright enough to not have noise problems in the flame, even at ISO 1600. The result of raising the black point is a significant darkening of the entire photo. The result works for this image, but not for most. Tomorrow's has bad noise in the blue sky, but I like the picture enough to post it anyway. I'm still figuring out the best way to compress for Aminus3, this one just ended up nice, but if you either use curves or levels or black point to define more as black (losing some definition in your darks, but it's a trade off), you'll have less noise problems for pictures that don't suffer when darkened.

Did that make sense at all? I'm a little tired so probably not...