The invention relates to a process, to a device for smoothing dark regions of images and to a coding system. a noise level is associated with each image and a luminance value is associated with each pixel, a threshold value is calculated, at least two values delimiting a smoothing range are defined, for each current pixel, the luminance of the pixel is compared with the said values, if the luminance of the current pixel lies in a smoothing range, the luminance of several pixels in an analysis window is compared with the said values, if the luminance of certain pixels lies in the same range as the value of the luminance of the current pixel, the value of the luminance of the current pixel is modified as a function of the said threshold values.