I have an image that I would like to do some smoothing over on. 

Lets say there is a faint red spot on a white background. I would like to apply some algorithm that will smooth over the red with the white pixels surrounding the red pixels.

I thought this would be an application for the noise reduction tools ...

http://scikit-image.org/docs/dev/auto_examples/plot_denoise.html 

... but the picture output looked the same as before.

What is the best algorithm for smoothing over pixels by re assigning a pixel value with the average value of the pixels surrounding it?

Thank you