How I Sharpen & Reduce Noise in Lightroom

you hey guys this is Anthony Morgan tee I am mr. photographer calm in this video I'm going to demonstrate how to sharpen and reduce noise in an image now let me say right off the bat that this method that I'm going to demonstrate isn't unique to me there are a lot of photographers that do it this way I didn't invent it by no means I actually started doing it maybe three or four years ago and what prompted me to do it was I was looking at the portrait work of a photographer named Gregory Heisler and Heisler often uses large format cameras to take his portraiture these are 4 by 5 and 8 by 10 cameras and what he would do is he takes advantage of the tilt chef lenses that are on those cameras so that he could have a very specific part of his portrait in focus and quite often the focus would fall off dramatically to the other parts of the image and what he achieves by doing that is he really gets the viewer to look where he wants him to look because our our nature is that we'll look at something that is in focus and we'll look away from the parts that are out of focus well with sharpening and noise reduction and sharpening obviously you're gonna sharpen a part and someone will hopefully look at that sharp part but noise reduction what it actually does to reduce noise it kind of blurs the image a little bit it kind of blends that noise and blurs it out so you're actually softening the image so you could use sharpening and noise reduction to kind of guide your viewer to look at a very specific part of the image the part you want them to look at unfortunately if you use the global adjustments that are found in the detail panel you'll be sharpening every pixel almost if you could use masking you can mask out some of the more homogenous areas of your image but by and large your sharpening pretty much everything and with noise reduction you're reducing noise everywhere well what I found is that if I use a brush I could very specifically sharpen where I want and very specifically reduce noise where I want and what I found and what you'll find if you don't already know obviously when you look at an image usually the noise is going to be in the most homogenous part of the image of the background the sky something where tone in color it more or less very even not a lot of detail there and in the case of this gorilla if i zoom in you'll notice that the noise is very nose noticeable in the more homogeneous out-of-focus background but the noise isn't really as noticeable on her face so why reduce noise and soften all this detail when I really don't have to so what I'll do is I'll zoom in like this and I'll look at the image and in the case of this image when I look at it right on the background I could see there's color noise and if you're not familiar with color noise it's a little red green and blue dots and you can see that there's quite a bit of color noise on this image unfortunately a brush will not remove the color noise so I have to globally remove the color noise so I will go to the detail panel and it's been my experience with this specific camera this is a Nikon d 500 that if I move this color slider somewhere between 15 and 25 that I'll almost always totally obliterate the color noise so what I'll generally do is just kind of edge it up and right there at 18 I could tell it took away the color noise and I'll do a before after and it takes a second for it to render so there's before let it render their rendered you can see that color noise now I'll turn it back on and there is after so maybe there's just a touch still there so I'm going to just inch that up a little more like 22 there it's definitely gone now there is before and there is after so you could see it definitely removed the color nice hopefully there came through in the video but it really left the actual noise there still luminance noise there you could see that looks like film grain well to do this method of reducing noise and sharpening with the brush what I recommended you do and what i do is i zoom out now typically if you're going to do global noise reducing with the detail tab i do recommend you stay zoomed in you zoom in on a part where you want detail and hopefully in that same zoomed in view you have a part where you want to reduce noise so you could really balance all these slider movements to get an optimum adjustment of detail on your image but with the brush i really recommend that you zoom out and it's just more efficient this way so now i'll open the brush tool and if you have sliders moved reset the sliders by double clicking on the word effect and when you do you just reset the sliders now what I usually do is I start out with reducing noise where I don't want the noise and I'll have feathering flow and density all at 104 now I'll have Auto mask unchecked then I'll go down here to the noise slider and I'll just move it all the way right up and I could reach us that and I'll get a pretty big brush and you can see I have a pretty large brush and I'll just come in and by the way this image was shot at an ISO of 1800 so there is some noise and I'll just come in and I'll just come in and I'll stay away from the gorillas face completely so I'll just come in I'm doing these little little big broad strokes strokes and if I want to see the overlay I could hit the O on the keyboard and it will give me that red overlay you also could check this little box down here in the left hand corner so what I'll do then I'll get a smaller brush and I'll come up here maybe I'll come over here in a second now what I'll do though is I'll turn on auto mask and so for these adjustments that are close to the gorillas face what I want to make sure is that plus sign does not go over the gorillas at all I want to make sure the plus sign stays outside of the gorillas and usually it works pretty good sometimes it will encroach a little bit depending on how close in tone your background is to your subject but usually you'll find that these little edges won't matter as much so I'll come in and I've reduced noise now now I'll turn this overlay off by hitting the O key again on my keyboard to turn it off now I want to zoom back in just to look so I have the brush open and it's in brush tool mode but if I hold the spacebar in it'll turn into the magnifying glass and I could zoom in and now you can see that it did a pretty good job it reduced the noise quite a bit if I turn the entire brush off there's the noise and turn it back on there it is without noise now if I feel that it didn't do a good enough job and I'll zoom back out I'm gonna hold the spacebar and again and click on this image again I could come in and double the block duplicate the brush and I'm going to get rid of this info over here by hitting the I key on my keyboard and if I want to duplicate the brush the easiest way I think is just to right-click right on the little button and click duplicate and you could duplicate that brush and then come off it and then you could zoom back in hold the spacebar in so now we're kind of like got double the brush strokes on there there's before and there's after and you'll notice we didn't brush on the the Gorillaz face so we didn't soften that at all we just reduced the noise in the background now I'm going to zoom back out I'm gonna hold the spacebar and again and click on the image again now I want to selectively sharpen specific parts of the image now what I'm going to do is get a new brush I'm going to click on new I want to reset the slider so I'm gonna double click on the word effect and then I want to bring sharpness and to start I'll turn it all the way up it probably won't stay there but I'm gonna put it there for now and now I got a determine what do I want sharp well I want her eyes I want her face pretty much sharp and I want her ear sharp I really don't think um you know the dome overhead or back needs to be sharp but down in here does and I'll have Auto mask off to begin alright I might turn it on so I'll come in here and I'll just paint in here now I'll turn the overlay on by hitting the o key again it does help me see what I'm doing sorry and again I have a feather flow and density all add 100 you notice I'm staying away from the edges again all right so I want her sharpen there I want probably in here I think could be sharp get some sharpness there I might come in and erase that if I feel it doesn't need it I want her ear sharp to figure yours kind of interesting alright so we'll do that now what I'll do is I'll come in and turn auto mask back on and I'll come towards the sudden edge and again I want to keep that plus sign away from the background I just want to stay on her face all right you know come or maybe I really need it down there but let's see so I'm gonna turn the overlay off I'm gonna hit the O key and turn it off okay that's probably a little too sharp but I'm gonna leave it that way for a minute so you could see there's before and there's after all right so that's sharpening and noise reduction added to this image there's before and there's after what I'll probably do is maybe just tweak that down just a little bit and again if you feel that isn't sharp enough you could duplicate that as well just right-click on the little button and click duplicate but I'm not going to here I don't think it's needed so really that is how I sharpen in reduce noise in an image really with the brush very specific parts and just to finish it off I'm gonna do one more just real quick to show you my actual workflow this image here again was shot with the nikon d 500 and this is at an ISO is 6 6400 so there's a considerably more noise here and again I I would zoom in so I'm gonna close the brush for a second and zoom in and look and there is color noise a lot of color noise on this one so I would take this color slider and again I've found between 15 and 25 really get rid of color now it actually receipted removed the color everywhere but right in here there's a tiny bit right just tiny bit so I'm gonna tweak it up to 25 and it's gone pretty much a tiny bit maybe but I think that's good so that's the only global adjustment I'm gonna do but you could still see there's quite a bit of noise so I'm gonna zoom out I'm gonna go to my brush I'm going to reset the sliders by double clicking I'm going to go to the noise slider and put it up at 100 I'm gonna turn auto mask off I'm gonna get a large brush and I'm gonna just paint I'm gonna turn the overlay on by hitting the O key and I'm gonna paint stay away from the grill and paint all right then I'm going to turn auto mask on and get a smaller brush and come in here and get the edges make sure that plus sign does not touch the gorilla all right the guy missed a spot right here [Music] here and I probably missed more but for the sake of this video I think you guys understand it maybe in here sometimes when auto mask is on too it will miss spots and you'll have to go over it a few times as you could see here let me turn auto mask back off and kind of get it better in there because those dark areas are definitely the harbour of noise it's gonna hold more noise in those dark areas so you want to make sure you get those really the darkest areas this is effectively as you can when you reduce noise now I'm gonna turn the overlay off hit the O key I'm gonna zoom in by holding in the spacebar I'm gonna look at it let it render takes a second there's it softened it greatly all right there's before and there's after and if I feel that it didn't soften it good enough I could go to this button right click on it and duplicate it okay zoom in again hold the spacebar in as before and they're after so it really reduced a ton of noise right I think that's good and you got to remember to the person that took the picture is the only one that really is gonna zoom in and look at the noise look for the noise generally speaking everyone else that's gonna look at the image they're just gonna notice if the noise is really crazy bad or if the sharpening is over sharpened other than that they tend to not notice that they they'll this is good enough and you can see it's really blurry now again I could have used the global adjustments in the detail tab and I could have used the masking slider to mask some of that background but I've also have less control of where I'm sharpening it's still sharpening pretty much everywhere else on the gorilla maybe I don't want to do that I just want to sharpen her face so I'm gonna get a new brush and I'm going to reset everything by double clicking on the word effect I'm gonna go to sharpness and I'm gonna temporarily turn that all the way up and I just really want to do her face in so I'll turn the overlay on by hitting the O key and I have Auto mask off for now I don't think I need to turn it on for this straightforward kind of like that just like that maybe I'll do her ear too over here this alright I'll turn the overlay off I'll hit the O key again and we'll do a before after there's before and there's and that's it that's really all you need to do and that's the way I do it that's the way a lot of photographers do it and a lot of top top photographers photographers that are bazillion times better than me that's the way they do it they don't worry about the noise that's on her face because most people aren't going to notice it because there's so much detail there so they're not really noticing the noise so and it's not as noticeable really the noise is and is noticeable it's more noticeable in these more homogeneous areas of the background where it's blurry and out of focus so that's how I go about doing it hopefully this helps you better sharpen and reduce noise in your images and make them a little more interesting make people notice the gorillas face a little more readily because that's the sharpest part of the image everything else is not as sharp you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 67,556

Keywords: photography, photographer, post processing, adobe, lightroom, photoshop, sharpening, noise reduction

Id: vRg0wn2vgeY

Length: 16min 33sec (993 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2019