Lessons

Lesson Info

Image Enhance: Noise Reduction

1 I also promised you that we would talk 2 about noise reduction a little bit later, 3 and this is that time. 4 So because noise reduction 5 requires you to have noise, 6 and the portrait we were working on at the time 7 didn't have any noise in it, 8 I've pulled up a couple images here. 9 One of 'em is from a wedding that we did in The Bahamas, 10 actually the same wedding 11 that we just worked on from this photo. 12 Although this doesn't have any real noise in it 13 because it was shot at 50 ISO, I believe. 14 Yeah, 50 ISO. 15 But this one in the evening 16 was shot at a very high ISO. 17 So it was shot at 6,400 ISO. 18 And as you zoom in, you can see 19 that there's quite a bit of grain involved in this. 20 So there's a lot of noise. 21 It's nice and sharp, but there's a lot of noise. 22 So when I look at this image 23 in the develop area, so in the adjustments area, 24 if I go to the detail section, 25 I can go in and remove the noise manually, 26 like we talked about. 27 So her...

e's the manual noise reduction, 28 and then here's the AI noise reduction option. 29 I just click on this button. 30 But let's play around with the manual noise reduction first. 31 So in manual noise reduction, 32 there is luminance, detail and contrast, 33 and then there's color noise reduction, 34 which is actually always employed. 35 So the nature of a digital image has color noise in it. 36 So there's always gonna be 37 some kind of color noise reduction on every image. 38 Most of the time it's around 25. 39 And so that's just gonna be based on 40 what Adobe thinks your specific camera needs. 41 But 25 is kind of that general happy medium 42 where it's removed the noise. 43 If I take the color noise reduction out, 44 you can always see noise. 45 That's not because you have a bad camera. 46 That's because that's the nature 47 of creating an image digitally with a bunch of squares 48 of red, green, and blue pixels. 49 And so if I double click this, takes it 25. 50 25 at 6,400 ISO gets rid of all the noise. 51 So you very rarely have to take 52 your color noise reduction up 53 unless you're working off of a file on a very old camera. 54 Okay, so we're not gonna deal with this all that much. 55 What we're gonna deal with is the luminance noise reduction. 56 And I'm zoomed in on just some blue area here. 57 But I'm gonna include her earring as well 58 so that you can see what's happening. 59 If I take the luminance noise reduction up, 60 and let's just take it to, say, 50%, 61 you can see that it softens everything up 62 and gets rid of a lot of that noise. 63 But it starts to blur some of the specifics 64 or the edges on this earring. 65 And if I go all the way to 100%, 66 you can see it really blurs it, 67 and you can see how it starts to pixelate around the edges. 68 So the pearl looks nice. 69 It's nice and soft right here. 70 But the edge to the blue looks pretty bad. 71 And especially right here at the edge 72 where it's turning to the sky, 73 that looks really pixelated. 74 And of course, right here looks really awful. 75 And if I scan over here, 76 I mean, it's doing a horrible job 77 at trying to soften up the noise. 78 Now, 100%, no one's gonna do that, 79 but let's take it down to 50%. 80 We've gotten rid of a good amount of noise, 81 but there's still quite a bit of noise in there, 82 but I don't see any major artifacting issues. 83 And so 50% is a pretty high number 84 on a manual luminance noise reduction, 85 but it still works. 86 All right, let's take the detail up. 87 So I'm just dragging it up to 100%. 88 And you can see that it starts 89 to sharpen her eyes and her eyebrow, 90 but also you start to see that kind of jpeg artifacting 91 that's going on on her skin, 92 which is not good. 93 We don't want that, 94 but we want those sharp eyes. 95 So we have kind of a problem. 96 Do we choose sharper eyes or do we choose smoother skin? 97 That's a choice we have to make. 98 So I'm gonna drag this back down to 50%, 99 which is about where we would normally leave it. 100 And then, there's the contrast option. 101 Contrast basically just determines 102 how much contrast there is in these areas like this. 103 So we're adding contrast but not necessarily detail. 104 So again, if I take the detail up, 105 we start to get that artifacting. 106 But if I take the contrast up, 107 we don't get quite as much artifacting, 108 but it brings a little bit of that contrast in 109 so that the eyelashes start to pop out, 110 the eyes start to pop out. 111 And so we get a little bit more detail. 112 So let me zoom out, show you what I'm seeing here. 113 So I'm gonna zoom out just a little bit 114 so that we see- there. 115 That's a pretty good... 116 All right. 117 We still have some noise. 118 You can see the noise in the softer areas of the blue. 119 You can see it in his jacket here. 120 You can see it on the skin a little bit. 121 But that looks okay. 122 But as we increase our luminance noise reduction, 123 you can notice that the hair 124 starts to get a little bit soft. 125 So all of those are just back and forth. 126 So we have trade-offs. 127 We make trade-offs everywhere in photography. 128 And in this case, we have a choice 129 between too much noise 130 or too little detail. 131 We go back and forth. 132 And that is manual noise reduction. 133 Generally speaking, I like to keep the detail area 134 down or at the middle. 135 Luminous noise reduction 50% 136 is about as far as I want to go on that. 137 And then contrast is something 138 that I'm willing to go up higher on 139 because it helps to get a little bit more detail. 140 But if you go too high on the contrast, 141 you end up making the skin look a little bit bad. 142 So we don't want to go too far on that. 143 So we have to be careful about 144 how much noise reduction we put into something. 145 And oftentimes when we put 146 too much noise reduction into something, 147 then we have to go up to the effects panel 148 and we have to add some grain in 149 to kind of mask some of the problems that we've created. 150 That's just kind of the give and take of noise reduction. 151 So let's go back to detail, 152 and let's turn off the noise reduction 153 so that we're back to that really, really gritty 154 noisy image, which is... 155 It's not horrible, but it definitely isn't the best. 156 And we're going to solve this 157 by simply clicking on the DeNoise option 158 here in the AI section of the noise reduction area. 159 Now, what's gonna happen is when I push this button, 160 it is going to make a brand new version of this file 161 as a DNG, or a digital negative. 162 It's going to send it to the cloud 163 and get instructions as to how to best manipulate 164 the noise on this image 165 to make it as good as possible. 166 The goal is keep the detail, remove the noise. 167 That's what the AI is attempting to do. 168 So let's see what it does. 169 And I have not used this image, 170 so we're gonna find out how well it does. 171 I click on DeNoise. 172 It starts churning. 173 It's gonna send it up to the cloud, 174 get some instructions, 175 and then it's gonna show us an example 176 of what it's gonna look like. 177 Now, if I click on the minus here, 178 so I'm gonna click on this little minus button, 179 that shows me the whole image 180 that way I can go straight over to the eye and zoom in 181 that way I don't have to go hunting around for it. 182 Now, this is before. 183 This is after. 184 Before. 185 After. 186 Now, let's zoom out again and let's go to her hair. 187 This is before. 188 This is after. 189 Before. 190 After. 191 Do you see how we actually have detail in the hair? 192 We actually have more detail in the hair after 193 than we did before. 194 And this is just at 50%. 195 So I can take it up to 100%. 196 And look at her skin. 197 This is before. 198 This is after. 199 Let's go down to the eye. 200 This is before. 201 This is after. 202 Now, 100% is a little bit too much, 203 but that's amazing. Look at that. 204 I mean, even the kind of the wrinkles under the eyes. 205 Look at that, before. 206 After. 207 Now, I'm gonna zoom out. 208 That's just too much noise reduction. 209 But if we go to about 50% or maybe even 60%. 210 That's before, that's after. 211 That's pretty good. 212 I think I'm gonna go back down to 50%. 213 Actually, I think I could get away with 40%. 214 Before, after. 215 Yeah, that looks pretty good. 216 Before, after. 217 I don't want to go so far that she's just glossy smooth. 218 And I'm gonna scan around and look at her hair. 219 Before, after. 220 That looks great. 221 And it's going to create a stack out of these two images. 222 It's gonna take about 15 seconds. 223 I'm gonna hit enhance, 224 and we're gonna wait. 225 And it's just gonna stack this new version 226 on top of the old version. 227 And then, we can use that old- or the new version 228 because now it's a digital negative. 229 It's still raw and we can adjust it to our heart's content, 230 but now it's going to be clean and smooth. 231 There it is. 232 Look at that. 233 So much smoother. 234 Hair is still there. 235 Look at the... 236 That's pretty soft there. 237 And let's zoom in a little bit onto that. 238 Look at that. 239 So now, instead of having that weird edge on the pearl, 240 and instead of having that strange, 241 like, blue section on the pearl, 242 it is a very smooth looking pearl. 243 The edges are clean, 244 there's plenty of detail in this part of the earring, 245 and her skin looks nice and smooth. 246 Everything looks better 247 because we used AI to do the work. 248 So if you have a set of photos that you know are noisy 249 because you were on vacation and it was dark in a museum 250 or it was a portrait that was later in the evening, 251 or even a wedding that you're shooting, the high ISO photos, 252 you don't have to do one at a time like that. 253 For instance, here, I've got these photos 254 that I took in a library, 255 and they're really grainy. 256 Okay, so these were taken in very dark. 257 They're 1,600 ISO. 258 But they were shot with a LUMIX G camera, 259 and it's pretty noisy camera. 260 It has a pretty small sensor on it, 261 so it's just naturally noisy. 262 The grain on it, the grain structure's fine. 263 It looks pretty as a grain structure. 264 But if I want to smooth these things out 265 and make them less grainy, 266 all I have to do is go into the grid itself, 267 and I'm gonna just choose all of these library photos. 268 So I'm gonna choose this one. 269 I'm gonna hit the command key and choose this one 270 and this one, and this one, 271 and that one, and that one. 272 I'm gonna even choose, you know... 273 I'm gonna choose all of these. 274 So these are, oh, and even these up here. 275 So all of these photos are images 276 that I want to remove the grain on. 277 So all I have to do is right click these images 278 and go to the enhance feature, 279 which is in the dropdown menu. 280 See, it says, "Enhance," with the triple dots. 281 Click on that and it's going to open up 282 this enhanced dialogue box. 283 I'm gonna choose what this enhance 284 is gonna look like on the first photo. 285 So I'm just gonna scan and make sure 286 that I like the amount of removal. 287 So that DeNoise at 40% seems to work most of the time, 288 so I'm gonna keep that. 289 I'm gonna create a stack, 290 and it's going to create a stack 291 for every single one of these images. 292 And it's gonna take about 88 seconds, 293 so here we go. 294 Enhancing 11 photographs. 295 They're all gonna get stacked on top. 296 So the new cleaner image is going to be 297 sitting up on top of the original raw image. 298 But it's still a raw image, 299 so I can adjust it to my heart's content. 300 Now, you can see up in the top left hand corner 301 that the status bar is almost done. 302 So there's always a status bar as it's churning out photos, 303 whether it's exporting them or converting them. 304 11 of 11 photos are now done. 305 And if I go into any of these, 306 you can see that there's, like, a little two 307 up in the top right hand corner 308 of any of these photographs. 309 If I click on that photograph and click on that two, 310 it opens up a tray down at the bottom 311 and shows you the different versions. 312 So this one and that one. 313 So if I double click it, 314 I'm looking at the new one, 315 which is up on the top of the stack. 316 And then if I click on the other one, 317 that's the old one. 318 So you can see the difference between here's the old, 319 there's the new. 320 Old. 321 New. 322 Especially in those shadows, look at that. 323 Old. 324 Look how noisy and ugly that shadow is. 325 And then when you go new, it is smooth. 326 That is so perfect. 327 That shadow is great. 328 So old, new. 329 Old, new. 330 So we've just proven that noise 331 is kind of a thing in the past. 332 Feel free to increase your ISO 333 and use the noise reduction. 334 And usually 30 to 40% is all you need. 335 And that AI is going to create some really beautiful images. 336 I shoot family portraits at 800 and 1,600 ISO all the time 337 because I can just run it through 338 that auto noise filter that's using AI, 339 and it will make everything look great. 340 And you'll still have detail in the hair, 341 you'll still have all the detail. 342 It'll be clean, beautiful. 343 It's excellent. 344 I'm even gonna look here at this book. 345 I'm really curious as to how this book is gonna look. 346 Look at that. 347 That looks fantastic. 348 And if I open up the... 349 So let's look right here. 350 Those lettering, look at this. 351 Here's the original, 352 and then here's the new one. 353 Fantastic. 354 See, it's still got grain to it. 355 It just limited the grain, 356 so it doesn't look like it's overly smooth. 357 Still has a texture to it, 358 but it's not- it doesn't look like just sand. 359 It actually looks like a nice small amount of grain. 360 So the point of this little lesson 361 is the AI noise reduction filter 362 inside of Lightroom is fantastic. 363 It's available in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, 364 so use it and love it.