Lessons

Lesson Info

Noise Reduction in Lightroom

All right, so we got a day one here when a deal with some noise reduction the easy quick dirty simple way in light room on dh then lindsay's going to show a seventeen more ways to do it in a photo shop because there's some great ways to do it and there's some great software but if you've been in the digital round for a little while you're probably familiar with software like noise and inge on things that were out there the first digital cameras were really, really, really, really noisy and the noise software in our editing programs kind of was horrible. But since the last couple of orations of light room in adobe camera they did something magical in the noise reduction it's ridiculous like you can really make all kinds of noise disappear um that would be light room four, three three four and then five amazing two not so much not so much you might want a different program to do it. Yeah if you have three, four or five for like room amazing. Okay, so another really cool thing I'm going t...

o show you guys up here. Um I have to find a file with a lot of noise and what's neat about using something like light room is can you imagine going through your folders and trying to find a photo that you took at twelve thousand eight hundred s o or something like that I don't even know how we begin, but when you use cataloguing software like this, it has all the information on your files so I can go over here and I can start searching by metadata and I can say, I want my s o speed you just like some files though. First catalogue all the photographs we have this catalog and I'm gonna go to metadata up here how many things can I pick where we go and we can go toe eso speed and basically it's going to give me all of the different is those that were used for all of the photos that are living in this catalogue or the folder? I could just go to the folder for that one day, but I want to find something nasty. So a sixty four hundred were tempting fate here. This is a shot with lindsay let's. See what this looks like? That's it that's not all right, so that's something. We're gonna show you the second. So this is on ly now showing me the files that are half sixty, four hundred that quickly I was able to look that up. Let's. Go ahead, double click this one look and see if we have any noise in the shadows and stuff like that was load up. What it's doing now? This loading guys is now that I'm viewed in one toe one it's taking all that raw dad and processing it to try to give me j peg preview based on all the developments settings that I've told us to do. So it's consulting that little list of adjustments and applying them and giving me a really big picture to look out so there is some noise, but god, this looks like nice fine film grain I'm trying to get what kind of house? Slow film, speed that would have been no, listen, that it's great. So I'm just had an objection. This is the d a hundred file in sixty four hundred. I mean, the first time I saw it it's nuts. But we have to pretend it's bad to get rid of it for you guys live. Okay, so there is some noise here. Basically, what I did is here's our tears are here's our panel's over here. Other options. I'm gonna go down into details because we're definitely and fine details. And what I appreciate is they give you a one to one preview here in case resumed out here. Okay, so we could just go ahead and carry this guy around. There's some eyes there we go there's a hair in a zoo man. But we're gonna go here cc on a larger screen and we could do our sharpening here, which I'll get teo but first I want to do our noise reduction so you ready for all this? This is really tough, scott. Before after before, after dunn ready now I could go and grab it, select all development settings, sink settings, check none and then just go specifically to my noise reduction synchronize none of those files have noise anymore. Now one of things that you want to be careful of is when you were dragging a noise slider. What will happen is if you drag it too far, the picture be becomes it starts to become looking blurry. It starts to look a little bit soft because as it's reduced a lot of that noise, it's not quite sure what noises versus what's grain versus woods detail it's not really able to distinguish when you pull all the way to the right, and so the picture will look soft. It's basically makes it looks like a posterized image, so you don't need to really go too far, but when you do begin to reduce noise even at a little bit of mt, sometimes it does soften a tiny bit so you can combat that yeah, so what we're gonna do is first for not going to do one hundred noise reduction. I've very seldom gone over twenty ever, and I mean that's just shoot at super super crazy files that kind of fall apart so you can kind of adjust this over here, so see how it's kind of lessening the detail in the noise and increasing the detail in the noise so you can kind of get rid of the bad noise and try to amplify that film green. So we don't really have to do this off the barbie doll, the photo just to get rid of the noise. I'm gonna bring that back down. Leave my detail where it wass color noise really doesn't exist in this photo. If you have some of your older cameras or something more basic cameras, some of this noise, some of these speckles in here that you might see might be different colors like purples and greens. Ah, lot of times it has to do with your lens and your sensor. You get little chromatic abrasion looking dust in there? Yeah, definitely with older, older cameras with long exposures at night is where you would have seen this most. If I can force one pushed the issue even if even if I overexposed any color at all you wouldn't see me it would just be reading green and different colored speckles so we don't we don't have that problem thankfully we don't have it so what were in the detail slider they definitely pair these things on purpose because oh yeah um we're going to fix that okay my question so see you you like this love this okay oh you mean like what and result no well because I think it looks really noisy but we're at what what percentage rate right now is you I mean, three months literally just curious because out there it looks really nice but I'm just like yeah, I struggle with that too because I you guys know what you're doing is yeah at what point do I say right this is gonna be acceptable versus you know where I don't wanna push it because you have a point of too much because I thought that still looked really and I struggle with that on a daily basis when I'm working on my own image and you know that's a great question and what that has to do a lot with two is what is the end product for this? Is it going on web? Is it going into an album that's ten by ten or is it going to be on a wall that's you know thirty by forty so that's the difference so you can kind of judge that you could actually exported as a test if you wanted to, um I usually just zoom in at one hundred percent and just try to judge at that point how objectionable it is but that really knowing where it's going to go? What makes the big difference? Um and I'm looking for me noises a problem when it interferes with me seeing detail like that's I mean that's a big one when I start being like wow, she has let's say that it's ah head shot and I can't see any skin detail because there's so much noise now that's a problem, but for here when you're zooming in on my face it's so small that even if you zoomed in on an image with zero noise, it won't leave mean seeing that much detail anyway, because it's yours you mean to pixel level at that point in there it looks I mean that's their it looks amazing. So that's an eight hundred picks along seventy two dp I web resolution photos. This is what you would put on five hundred p explicar facebook or delivered to a client wedding client you would export all their event photos. This isn't for them to make prince albums, this is what they get and fortunately brides and grooms that's all they really care about to put on facebook and their parents want the album's holidays um but if you look at that that's sixty four hundred s so minimal that noise reduction that we showed and you export it and you guys could print that and he wouldn't be able to tell me there's grain ottoman court so it's neat it's you get you get we get stuck in this round where were the ones with our heads buried in at one to one ratios or three to one ratios like god okay so is that a pixel or a grain like it's like we get to the point where I think you just can't tell anymore on another good point is like if you guys have seen billboards up close oh god they're closer swatches of color so it's also about viewing distance in the side so if you're doing it from far away and not have close it doesn't matter it's about how it's being perceived yeah so if it's a gigantic file that gigantic print people can walk up to maybe it matters but again if you could see all the detail it's totally fine eyes is obviously so better but yeah you know what in a lot of images if you're shooting this is this is beyond the scope of this class but if you're shooting eight bit for sixteen bit you have more data and your colors if you have a normal camera you're working a bit you can start seeing some banding because everything demanding like the nonce with grady and the sky you fix that by adding noise because noise exists and generally everything noises those little used to be the little photo cells that were gathering the light to make the print in the first place so um sometimes adding noise combats radiance and skies and things to so noise isn't always our enemy unless like lindsay said it's overpowering detail so um so to answer your question when do we think it's enough usually twenty or thirty is enough up to sixty four hundred s o for me in my d seven hundred and ninety eight hundred and I can do web or up to eleven by fourteen inch prints and I've never noticed any grand and one of the and what's your what do you do for shortcut for before and after oh so it's just the pipe tool and develop module okay, so it's right underneath silly it's a little lineup what ill do um I do differently this totally fine I zoom in um and what I'll do is I will start reducing the uh the noise and then I'll do my before and after and see if I thought it got cold so it if it didn't decrease the detail that I want to keep and it still looks sharp then I don't have a problem with it I think that might be a little much at thirty I think I like twenty better personally safer I think twenty was a little safer or twenty years when we're in there two hundred well, um and we have tools to be able to sharpen it up, so if we do go to thirty, we have shopping so you want to jump there? Yeah that's where we're gonna go to thirty I was going over to just a little bit trying to bring it back for you guys it's got a thirty three thirty so now she does look a little bit smooth and I was going to say this is where they probably sharpening and noise reduction together because there are some tools to kind of keep your contrast in detail there within the noise reduction, but sharpening is really where we're going to get that cool effect we're gonna bring her back out now what you started to see his grain and pixels and everything it's gotta sharpen something sharpened essentially kind of just amplifies nearby neighboring pixels and you wouldn't do one hundred five years all the way to the right just to kind of show you what it's doing what you basically do this is kind of the intensity of our light or of our sharpen and this is the size of our grab right here the radius of those pixels you can start really low we can go really high and what it's gonna do is I'm gonna hold down my favorite kind of button or what is it that they get write this down walt hold down all option while using these sliders see the reset thing came up but watch what happens when I grabbed the slider for radius it gives me the overlay it shows me what I'm working with so I can't see it too much here unless I go to all the way and then I start cranking it now I get it but that's just that's brutal so what I'm gonna do is go ahead instead holding out all not be like I want a little bit more there we go next are bringing out her face okay and now we're gonna bring up that fine detail we're working with a noisy file so I might not do that here it's difficult to see from there but you can see how we're starting to pull back that noise we got rid of so I might really bring a little bit of detail there and then here I might go ahead and take that masking and mask it down to only grab some of the thicker edges and stuff so if you see what this is doing when you sharpen just bring that back real quick um it sure are bring back your mascara like what it's showing is whatever you see there as he's dragging to the right just the right um as you doing the mask it's adding to what, um, would be sharpened? So whatever is white is what's being sharpened what's black is not again, so we go everything and take a look can you see it without the mask when you do that, they go so right there, it's every everything. So why be a sharpened do seeing as you go right? You don't see it with it on just like white on black would be in your just like a layer of matching leather mask and photoshopped correct. So here we've got fully and here were kind of knocking it down the edges, so we'll leave it there and then you can kind of crank up and down so you can see how very quickly we can go ahead and grab a wider radius to kind of get lindsey's uh, major features on her because we resumed one hundred percent in I mean, yes, it's a big file, but now we're so tight and we're really not having a ton of stuff to work with here, so we see it before and after on that, and I'm gonna take a look before after and before after, so we kept our sharpness, but we got rid of the noise it's noisy. There we go. So we didn't sacrifice any sharpness while maintaining our noise or while getting rid of the noise in that file. And, you know, I might like I might even go a little bit further than that. Its taste it. And again. Where it's going to be? Kind of depends.