The goal is to reduce noise.
This is on my iPhone 5s, which has bad low-light performance, as you can imagine. So I wanted to see if I could take a video (without the phone moving), and then merge all the frames in the video into a photo.
Either Mac or iPhone apps will do. I'm looking for something that's not command-line, is cheap ($10 at most) and easy to use -- like one-click software, rather than software that requires me to try many things and see what works well.
I'm not sure that this will work well due to how video works. Video is initially MUCH lower quality than photos. 1080p video is only around 2 megapixels of image quality. Further, cellphone video does not record each individual frame of video, but rather records the changes from one image to the next and only records a couple of photos per second or less on average. This means that the actual noise information is not going to be well preserved and artifacts from compression will result in adding noise to the attempt to form an image.
If you had a camera that supports capturing all I frame video, then that would potentially be useable, but anything that uses IBP frame video is not going to be ideally suited for this purpose.
You could try using Registax. Generally, Registax is used for astrophotography, particularly of the planets in our solar system. Registax uses the concept of superresolution to stack hundreds or thousands of frames, discard the worst, keep the best, then interpolate the information from all of those frames in such a way that it enhances detail and resolution.
While it is not specifically designed to do what you want, I see no reason why it couldn't be used for the purpose you are describing.
As an alternative, you could also use the median merge approach. Instead of using video and stacking to "photograph" low light scenes, just take about 10 still frames of the same scene (assuming no motion of anything within it) with the iPhone on a tripod of some kind. With Photoshop, you create a layer out of each of these still frames, select them all and convert to a smart object. Once you have a smart object, you set the stacking mode to median, which will GREATLY reduce the amount of noise in the scene without affecting detail.
Both solutions should work. The registax approach would be a little less manual work, however it might not produce as good a result as the manual stacking approach.
I know that you asked for a non-command-line solution, but I think that this one is simple enough to post. Moreover, I noticed the "no CLI" only after I wrote it, so... maybe could be useful for someone else.
There is an example doing exactly that (although for a different objective --- long exposure without ND filters) that I think it is what you need in this blog entry by Patrick David. Look at the end where he says "Something neat".
He uses the open source programs Hugin and ImageMagick to achieve the treat. In my Linux machine, without aligning, it's just one command:
convert test.mpg -evaluate-sequence mean -alpha off OUT.tif
(to align, it's a bit more complex, but still you can do it in a script easily).
Also interesting could be the use of a median filtering, simply changing mean to median above.
"Photoacute" is software that's designed to do frame-averaging and interpolation for noise reduction and super-resolution work from sequential still photos. I ran it years ago on a Mac, with good results, but haven't upgraded to the new version.
The iPhone 5s isn't on it's supported cameras list, but that doesn't matter for reducing noise by merging images. Sadly the 'lite' (non-raw, non-16bit) version is over-budget at $30, but perhaps some of its other tricks might be useful as well.
The website is here, but be warned that it's not the most sensibly laid out: http://www.photoacute.com/studio/index.html
There is an iphone App called Cortex Cam that takes 10 second video and converts it to a reasonably noise free photo. I have got good results with it sometimes.
