A low light noise reduction mechanism may perform denoising prior to demosaicing, and may also use parameters determined during the denoising operation for performing demosaicing. The denoising operation may attempt to find several patches of an image that are similar to a first patch, and use a weighted average based on similarity to determine an appropriate value for denoising a raw digital image. The same weighted average and similar patches may be used for demosaicing the same image after the denoising operation.