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.
Reducing Noise
Step One:
To reduce the noise in a “noisy ” image like
this (shot at 800 ISO, handheld, in a dark
hallway), 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 at least a 1:1 view. (Here,
the image was so dark, I increased the
Shadows and Exposure first.)
Step Two:
I usually reduce the color noise first, simply
because it's so distracting (if you shoot in
RAW, it automatically applies some noise
reduction. The image here is a JPEG, so
there's no noise reduction added). Dragging
the Color slider to the right reduces the color
noise. 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 15 (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, 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 work with,
but you may run across an image where
70 or 80 works best, so don't be afraid to
try both ends. Luckily, the Color slider itself
makes the most visible difference.
 
 
 
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