Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
If you wind up shooting at a high ISO or in very low light, chances are your image is
going to have some noise—either luminance noise (a visible graininess throughout
the photo, particularly in shadow areas) or color noise (those annoying red, green,
and blue spots). Although the noise reduction in previous versions of Lightroom
was kind of weak, in Lightroom 3 Adobe completely reworked the Noise Reduction
feature so now, it's not just good, it absolutely rocks. Not only is it more powerful,
but it maintains more sharpness and detail than ever before.
Step One:
To reduce the noise in a “noisy” image like
this (shot at 1600 ISO, handheld, at night),
go to the Develop module's Detail panel,
where you'll find a Noise Reduction section.
To really see the noise, start by zooming in
to a 1:1 view.
Step Two:
I usually work on reducing the color noise
first, simply because it's so distracting (if
you shoot in RAW, it automatically applies
some noise reduction. The image shown
here is a JPEG, so there's no noise reduction
added whatsoever). Dragging the Color
slider to the right reduces the color noise
(easy enough). So, start with the slider over
to the far left, and as soon as the color
goes away, stop, because once it's gone,
it doesn't get “more gone.” Here, there's
no visible improvement between a Color
setting of 30 (where the color first went
away) and 100. The Detail slider controls
how the edges in your image are affected by
the noise reduction. If you drag it way over
to the right, it does a good job of protecting
color details in edge areas, but you run the
risk of having color speckles. If you keep this
setting really low, you avoid the speckles,
but you might get some colors bleeding
(expanding, like they're glowing a bit). So,
since both have downsides, where do you
set the Detail slider? Look at a colorful area
of your image, and try both extremes. I tend
to stay at 50 and below for most of the
images I've worked with, but you may run
across an image where 70 or 80 works best,
so don't be afraid to try both ends. Luckily,
it's the Color slider itself that makes the
most visible difference.
