How to PROPERLY Sharpen & Reduce Noise in LIGHTROOM

hey guys this is Anthony Morgan tee I am mr. photographer calm sharpening and noise reduction - the new photographer it can be very confusing and even to the more experienced photographer they'll often get mixed results I think that's because they don't have a firm understanding about what each of the sliders actually do in this video I'm going to clear that all up but once a month or so I'll get an email from someone with an attachment they took a very important image and unfortunately they didn't nail focus and they'll send me the image and they'll ask me is there anything I could do to sharpen it or is there anything I could tell them to do to sharpen it unfortunately when we're talking about sharpening that's not what can be done you can't take an image that is out of focus and suddenly make it focused just can't be done what we're doing when we're sharpening an image is we're doing a little trick with contrast we're making the exact edge where a lighter thing is touching a darker thing and we're adding contrast to that tiny little edge and when we do that it makes the image appear sharper than it actually was resolved at now to demonstrate this I'm going to go to these gray bars and I'm going to zoom in on a transition zone this is a dark side and the light side and that edge is dark and this edge over here is light so that little edge is what we're actually doing or what we're affecting when we're adding sharpening to an image now I'm going to go to the detail tab and we'll go to the sharpening slider and you'll notice when I move that to the right at that exact tiny little edge we're making the dark side a little darker and the light side a little lighter and by definition that's contrast so we're adding contrast to that very tiny little edge and that's what we're doing when we're sharpening an image now there's other sliders under their radius you can see now on this dark side we have this tiny little dark edge we darkened with the sharpening slider itself right and then on the light side we have that tiny little light edge that we lightened the radius is how far out how thick of those do thick do you want those to be if I take that rightist slider move it to the right you see we're making them much thicker so the left side is thicker and the right side is thicker right at that edge now in real life what the radius slider would be used for is if you're sharpening something with very fine detail a macro of an insect and it's got tiny little hairs coming off its head you would take that radius slider move it to the left you want a smaller edge of contrast on the other hand if you're doing a landscape and you're sharpening a landscape there's nothing really superfine there and you may want to move radius to the right so really you could just eyeball your image and move that about and see where it gives you the best effect now the detail slider really just kind of serpaj is the amount slider let's take radius to the right so we make them thick so we have this dark edge in that light edge and if I take details to the right it's just gonna make the darker darker and the lighter lighter so it's really kind of supercharging the amount slider and those other lines there those are jpg artifacts so you could just ignore those but you could see what it does and masking I'm gonna cover in a real life scenario and tell you what that does but that gives you an idea what these three sliders do but really that's not the only sharpening that is in Lightroom there's more actually if you go up to the basic tab we have contrast I mentioned that when you're making that edge lighter and the other edge darker you're adding contrast and really the contrast slider is pretty much the same thing I'll let some let's go to one to one maybe okay and if we go to contrast you're just gonna make the lighter parts lighter and the darker parts darker and that's contrast so that in effect makes the image look a little sharper also texture and clarity look at clarity if I move that to the right it's got a different effect in contrast it makes this edge lighter in this sedge darker and it kind of just almost like you added a graduated filter there it's just kind of gradually getting darker that way it's a lighter darker you see what I mean so that's what that clarity does but it is adding contrast to the edge so there's with clarity at zero and there's clarity up so it's adding contrast at that edge now texture does it as well but it does it in a smaller zone you could see that let's go to maybe two to one and let's take texture down and move it to the right you can see that it's still making this side darker that side may be a little lighter but it's kind of fades out a little bit not as much as clarity clarity affected all the way almost maybe two-thirds of the way across the color bar and textures just doing it a little bit more than the detail a mouth slider but less than the clarity slider now those of you that are familiar with let's say an application like on one photo raw or luminar know that they have a structure filter in each of those applications and it's small medium and large and I think you could draw a corollary that the detail slider of sharpening amount slider is small structure then up in the basic tab the texture slider is medium structure and the clarity slider is large structure so you would affect these or you would use these to affect very specific parts of the image so let's get away from these color bars and get to a real image and talk about noise reduction really I strongly recommend that you do noise reduction early in your workflow as a matter of fact I recommend you do tone adjustments first you could do white balance too if the white balance is off so do white balance and tone adjustments and when I talk about tone adjustments I'm actually just talking about four sliders highlights shadows whites and blacks do those don't do contrast because contrast kind of makes it look sharper right so we don't want to do that the reason why you don't want to sharpen the image at this point is because you didn't remove the noise and when you sharpen it you're actually sharpening the noise and you're gonna make the noise that much harder to remove so right now don't do anything that's gonna enhance the sharpness of the image so just do the highlights shadows whites and blacks don't even do any color adjustments nothing there don't do any tone curve if you're shooting with a DSLR that requires lens Corrections you could do those but then go to the detail and you'll notice it's it's broke up into two sections sharpening and noise reduction and the noise reduction suction has two subsections luminance and color and I recommend you zoom in in this case I'm zoomed in two-to-one and if we zoom in you can see there's a lot of noise and there's a lot of these color specs whilst often they'll be red green or blue that's color noise and it's super common and it's actually very easy to rid go to the color slider move that to the right and you can see just go to a certain point and it's gone it's just like you just kind of movement moving lue it BAM it just disappears at a certain point now we have a lot of grain noise there that's the luminance noise and we'll get rid of that in a moment but that's what color noise is and look at that now there's two sliders below it there's a detail slider which really won't do much with the color noise I'm gonna explain that better up here in the noise reduction a luminance noise section but the smoothness slider if I move this to left let me show see these kind of color blotches came in there sometimes you'll find that you'll get rid of the actual kind of color dots that are there but you didn't you get these come in color blotches and then what you would do is move this smoothness slider to the right and it will just get rid of those as well so we got rid of all the color noise it's the easiest noise to get rid of now as far as luminance noise reduction when we take that slider to the right we're just kind of smoothing out that noise and you could see that it got rid of it but it really smooths away detail as well I'll look at the face of our gorilla if I take luminance all the way down to zero you can see there's a lot of little detail in her skin and if I move that to the right like that we just kind of obliterated all that detail that's where this detail slider comes in and again there's same sliders in the color noise reduction section as well you go to that detail slider and you move that to the right you'll rescue some of that detail see how it's drawn that detail back but hopefully won't reintroduce the noise see it does a really good job so that's your first kind of step of sharpening is right here so you're kind of just kind of rescuing some of that detail now what contrast does quite often when you reduce noise you smooth out all that noise you're reducing contrast as well and if you move that to the right you're gonna add contrast and it's very light it's not as heavy as the contrast slider in the basic tab like look right in here you can see this light area in this dark area if I take this contest contrast slider and move it to the right you can see how it's bringing back contrast it's reintroducing the noise though so we're just gonna leave that down now the way I go about doing this is I'll do color first get rid of that then I'll go to the luminance slider and I move it in groups of ten I usually start off at somewhere in the middle like 50 so I'll put it 50 we still have noise and then I'll go up to 60 so I move it in groups of ten we still have noise then I'll go up to 70 there's still a tiny bit of noise that probably would be good enough for me but for the sake of this demonstration let's go to 80 right okay the ad the noise is gone now I went from 70 there was a little noise there 80 the noise is gone but I'll go then to 75 so I'll split the difference so I just want to narrow down I really don't want to smooth it out so much that I'm gonna sacrifice detail even though I could draw some of the detail back with the detail slider I just don't want to do that so we'll just leave it at E this is a super noisy image by the way in the description below this video I'll have a list of the equipment I used in all the camera settings I used to capture all the images I'm showing you so we'll move detail to the right to a kind of rescue some of that detail and I think that's good so that's the way I would go about doing it I would do tone adjustments first I would do light balance have it needed it lens Corrections then I'll do nose reduction so the noise is done now comes the sharpening part now I mentioned at the top that we really have three different types of sharpening we have that large detail medium detail and small detail and I strongly recommend you start with large and work your way down to small so go to the basic tab now and you could zoom in for this if you like or just whatever works best for the specific image you're working in and start with clarity that's large detail you can move that to the right now actually larger detail would be contrast so we can move that to the right and add some contrast if we want also D haze adds contrast to the image now there's no haze here so those are the largest detail so you would would do those first contrast and D haze at this point then you would go to clarity so we're starting to drill down on our sharpening as well so we'll move clarity to the right a little bit now textures the medium structure and that's going to affect mainly I think the face of the gorilla and some of the fur the grille and we'll move that to the right then we'll jump down into sharpening here now for this sharpening on the detail panel I like to zoom in you also could just if it's not open already roll down this triangle and you have a little like one to one preview of the image here all you also could activate this tool and then anywhere you hover over the image that's what will show up in this window now I typically don't like doing that using this window I just think it's too small I much prefer to zoom in so I'll zoom in on somewhere like you know where there's detail here or the gorillas face and I'll move that to the right now you can remember it's just making the edges more contrasty you can see how it's reintroducing the noise we're getting some noise reason to reintroduce there so it's kind of a trade-off always is now radius move it to the right we're going to be affecting a larger radius so that's going to bring that edge out remember from our great Bowers move it to left it's going to narrow it down and I think the default position was fine oh we could again the detail slider works exactly the same that I mentioned in the gray bars it just kind of supercharges the amount slider and I don't think there's no need to move that and masking I'm gonna cover in the next image we're gonna do so I think that looks pretty good right there I want to pull that down a little bit now if that noise was really bothering me that I reintroduce slightly I could come in and add more noise reduction here if I want but I think it's fine so I think that looks pretty good now I could continue on with any processing I want to do but that typically is the last thing I'll do is sharpening now let's do another image kind of beginning to end a landscape image here I did do the tone adjustments the white balance is fine I didn't do anything else I did lens oh no this was a mirrorless camera so there wasn't any lens Corrections required so what we're gonna do is we'll go to detail first and it added some default amount of sharpening so let's just bring that down but what I will do is zoom in so I want to remove noise now and I'm looking usually the sky will have a lot of noise and again I will take that luminance noise reduction I'll move it to like 40 you know number like that it removed it all so I'll move it to I'll move it to 30 and it still looks like it's gone and by the way I don't see any color noise at all but I'll move that to ten just in case because I'm looking at a very small part of the image all right so we'll move it to 20 all right there's little noise there so I'll go to 25 there's still a little noise there for like 28 and it looks pretty much it's gone so I'm done with noise reduction then I'll continue on I'll go to the basic tab I'll add some contrast I prefer to add contrast usually with the tone curve just it's a medium contrast then now I'll go to that a large detail well let's say add some saturation just a little bit but now I'll go to the large detail which is the clarity slider go there move that to the right kind of eyeball now go to that medium detail which is the texture slider that to the right see that really really made it kind of pop that's slider right there and I'll go to the actual detail tab to the sharpening slider and I'll zoom in and this is going to do the fine detail so I would expect like these little like darker kind of lines on this post here I think it's going to affect those it's gonna affect a lot it's gonna affect the doc as well and stuff but we'll move that to the right you can see how it's really making that kind of see those edges much sharper that's over sharpened so we'll bring that down what you'll often find too is your eyes will get fatigued when you're looking at the image so long and you'll tend to over sharpen it because it doesn't your eyes are tired and your brain is tired of looking at it so it's good to walk away for a while let your eyes rest for a half hour so then come back and readjust any of the sharpening because you'll often find you over sharpened it and I might be over sharpening it now but we'll bring it like 240 and you can move radius around there's really this is a landscape image I think the radius at the default position is fine detailed the default position but what I want to really talk about is masking we don't need to sharpen everything with this these controls we really just want to sharpen the dock and the buildings don't need to sharpen the sky as a matter of fact when I turn sharpening up I reintroduce some noise up in there so we really don't want to sharpen let's say these expensive parts of the blue sky even the water there parts of that so what you could do is move masking to the right and it will apply the sharpening me too the parts of the image that have transition changes like the buildings the dock and so on and what you could do is hold the alt or option key when you move this slider and that will help you see what you're doing its alt if you have a PC option if you have a Mac hold it and click on the slider the entire screen is white that means white means sharpening is being applied everywhere move it to the right and now where black is coming in that's where sharpening is not being applied so I don't want it applied to the sky you can see how it's not applying it to parts of those posts parts of the dock and so on so wherever white is white is where the sharpening is being applied so I just really want to sharpen those edges like right like that I think that looks pretty good right there and if i zoom in I don't see any noise in the sky now and I think that is properly sharpened I think it looks fine now there's some other things you could do that may help you sharpen your image if you hold the alt or option key Alethea PC option if you have a Mac and click on the amount slider you'll get a black and white image many photographers feel this helps them sharpen the image when they pull that color out so this helps them better sharpen their image similarly hold that alt or option key in and click on that radius tab and you get this kind of weird kind of embossed gray look and if you move that to the right you could see your you're going to see the radius edges stronger so those edges remember we were with the gray bars how we made those thicker so that's what we're actually doing there and that helps you maybe maybe better see those edges similarly for detail it will do the same thing I think if you old that alter option key in and click down same thing you get that kind of embossed look for lack of a better way to describe it and that may help you better apply a mount radius in detail to your image most photographers I know don't really bother with that but they always hold the alt or option key in for masking it just really does help a lot now similarly for luminance detail in contrast you'll get a black-and-white image so if you click down for noise reduction I'm talking about you'll get the black and white image their black point image there and black and white image there and it won't do anything for these three sliders it just doesn't do it because you're trying to get rid of color so it's not going to give you color noise so it's not going to give you a black and white image so it doesn't do anything so experiment with that alt option key on these sliders and see if they help you I've found in the past that sometimes holding the alt or option key and adjusting radius does help but most often especially for an image like this that doesn't have a really strong subject in it it's doesn't it's not even doing anything it doesn't help at all so that is the way I go about doing it so this image would be pretty much done I'd probably add a vignette to it like that little darker vignette something like that so that image is done so that is I think everything you need to know about sharpening and noise reduction and remember that really all sharpening is is you're adding contrast to very specific parts of the image with the the the contrast slider you add contrast with the dehaze slider you're also adding contrast and those are kind of gross amounts of contrast with the clarity slider you're refining it a little more you're adding contrast but it's mainly more towards the mid-tones of the image with the texture slider again you're adding contrast but it's more towards the middle of sized objects in the image and then of course with the detail a mouth slider you're adding contrast to the smallest parts of the image so that's what that is so hopefully that all made sense thank you everyone who watches my videos I really do appreciate it I'll talk to you guys soon

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 159,111

Keywords: photography, photographer, post processing, adobe, lightroom, photoshop, tutorial, photo editing, how to, noise reduction, sharpening, clarity, structure, texture, lightroom cc, adobe photoshop lightroom, how to edit photos, adobe lightroom cc, landscape photography, professional photo editing, lightroom editing, edit, how to use lightroom, how to edit like, photoshop lightroom, how to edit travel photos, how to edit, how to edit photos like the professionals, how to edit in lightroom

Id: mZV38QDo388

Length: 22min 12sec (1332 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2019