A system, apparatus, computer readable medium, and method for noise reduction in image capturing devices involving an edge-preserving blur window is disclosed. In one embodiment, the edge-preserving blur includes only those pixels in the blur window that are visually close to the blur window's current center pixel in its blurring calculation. Limiting the pixels considered in the blur to those that are visually close to the center pixel ensures that the image's colors are not blurred along color edges within the image. Light-product information taken from the image's metadata, for example, the camera sensor's gain level, may be used to adjust the blur filter parameters dynamically. This allows the method to perform the appropriate amount of processing depending on the lighting situation of the image that is currently being processed.