1. A method for processing an image based on noise appearance in the image, comprising the steps of: a) forming a noise table representing noise magnitude vs. intensity of the image; b) providing a plurality of potential image processing paths, each path having at least one image transform; c) modifying the noise table according to the image transform(s) in the at least one image processing path to produce an output noise table; d) generating a noise metric from the output noise table, said noise metric representing the noise appearance of the image processed by the at least one image processing path; e) selecting one of the plurality of potential image processing paths based on the noise metric; and f) applying the selected image processing path to the image.