How To Remove Noise From Bird Photos Using Topaz Denoise or Lightroom - Noise Reduction Examples

g'day and welcome to the channel in today's video I'm going to show you how to quickly and easily remove noise from your wildlife images I'll explain what noise is what causes noise and what you can do to prevent it in the field but with any image you take it'll have a certain amount of noise so I'll show you how to use Lightroom's built-in noise reduction feature and also a piece of software called topaz D noise this is specifically made to reduce noise in your images I'll compare the two and hopefully you'll be able to make a decision whether it's worth buying this extra piece of software if you want to jump forward to Lightroom or topaz check the description below I have timestamps what causes noise and what is it well noises the grain that you see in an image this noise is caused by a number of factors the main one that everyone's aware of is probably your ISO setting so on your camera you'll have your shutter speed ISO setting and your aperture these will control your exposure so that IR so sitting as that ISO number gets higher so though you generally started around a hundred or fifty on an icon as that number increases the amount of noise and the images also increases think of it as say an image quality adjustment so as that ISO number climbs so say ISO 800 or 1600 your image quality will generally reduce so by increasing the ISO your image quality reduces and why is this an issue for wildlife photographers well we want high shutter speeds and often the only way we can get high shutter speeds is by increasing our ISO so it's a bit of a balance and a bit of a trade-off we often want higher shutter speed so that we don't get any motion where our images but not all cameras are made equally noise and one camera will often be different to noise and another camera so all the cameras like the old 7d or crop sensors they didn't handle noise very well at all but fortunately with our new full-frame cameras and the latest cameras they handle noise a lot better meaning that with the same amount of light they have a lot less noise and basically that's all ISO is doing by increasing that ISO number the sensor needs less lie to create the image allowing you those shutter speeds so we often talk about this ISO setting but there's a couple of other key factors to help reduce the amount of noise that you get in the field the first one probably the most important is your exposure if you under expose your image so if it's too dark you get more noise the alternative to that is if you're exposed to the right when you try and get your histogram as far to the right without blowing your highlights you will have the least amount of noise for the ISO setting that you have so we're always trying to expose to the right we'll reduce the amount of noise I've got a great example here of a white-faced hearing which allowed me to get pretty close I took a couple of photos of this bird changing my settings on purpose so one of them is at ISO 400 and the second one is ISO 5000 now I've exposed the ISO 5,000 right and you can see them we're not compare the two they look very similar even though the ISO setting is vastly different mind you we did have excellent light on this morning so that helped big time but as you can see by exposing to the right you can get really good usable images at high ISOs the other factor which you often may not realize is the color of the background how dark or light your background is if your background is dark it will show more noise if the backgrounds light will show less noise I've got a great example here I just shot this the other day in this image the top half of the image was a banks of green grass and Bank the bottom half was dirt or like dirt and these this is taken from the same image you can see at the same settings same way of setting thing was ISO 800 you can see on an old crop sensor body you can see the top is got quite a bit of noise and in the bottom the light area a lot less noise so that can also make a big difference if you're struggling with your noise be aware of what your background is third thing how much you crop your images if you crop your images a lot you'll see a lot more noise just over fact that you're zooming in on the image so we always try to crop as little as possible that will show this noise they're also there how much light you have and to be aware of your ISO sitting as your light proves reduce your ISO setting that would think of obviously reduce your noise good lighting and have less noise poor light overcast conditions hi eyes those results and really poor noise so to quickly summarize exposed to the right don't crop too much just be aware of what your settings are and be aware of your backgrounds as well okay so let's jump into Lightroom and have a look I'm gonna start off with this image of an Eastern yellow Robin just to show you how much noise that can be in images and this is probably a worst case scenario or a very tough case for any noise reduction software to deal with so I've got this image here as you can see it's underexposed buy a histogram probably about almost a stock and you can see the settings here ISO 1600 on that old 7d is probably pushing it and will show you just what I mean by noise so I'll just the exposure to get it to the right to get it about right and so we've gone almost a stop and if I go in to 100% you can see all this noise in the background and because the background is dark as I mentioned before that makes it even worse and it's pretty bad the noise and this image I do like the image I mean you know it's a pretty bird and the pose is good and sort of nice location so it's probably worth trying to save this image so I'll show you how you could traditionally do it in Lightroom so in Lightroom if you scroll down to the right hand side under sharpening so sharpening will introduce noise as well so for us to drag that all the way to the left you will get less noise as you can see but then we lose this sharpening so more sharpening way more noise so I think the default is around 40 and Lightroom so I'll leave it about 30 so there's this here says noise reduction and it says luminance if I drag this all the way to the right you'll see what happens on the screen it has applied noise reduction but it's applied it to the bird as well and you can see just how bad it is it's actually fairly awful on the actual background as well it just looks all blocky and there's some weird stuff going on in the background I've done a fairly poor job at trying to reduce the noise but that's obviously at a hundred percent so what I want to do is try and get the background looking as good as I can with the slider so dragging it back or keep looking at the at the background that's looking a little bit better there's still a bit of noise but we're not getting too much weird stuff happening tied to here to the adjustment brush tool we hit this adjustment brush tool we hit this noise effect from the drop-down noise and I reduced the noise by hundred what this means is I want to remove all the noise reduction that we just applied it's off the bird so we don't want any noise reduction on the bird so if I put that down to one hundred and I'll show you this effect and you'll see it pretty quickly so I've got my brush I can change the size of my brush I just use the little mouse wheel so I can click onto here and as I hold down the left mouse button and put this brush tool on can you see how it's removing all of that noise reduction that we just applied in the last step so I can go around the bird and remove the noise reduction so that it's only on the background and it's a bit of a time-consuming process because you want to try and get it if you want to know what you have and what you haven't applied to you can put o on the keyboard and you'll quickly see what you have and you haven't painted so I wouldn't have to go around this entire bird I'll just quickly do that so as you can see it's a lure of a time-consuming process but this is how you would traditionally remove just the noise from the background and not the bird so and if you want to make say you've actually gone over too much so you can see how we've gone too much here we've revealed some of the background we can hold the Alt key and it changes it to a - and we can get rid of the noise that we had painted on there it can get a bit tricky when you're trying to do these these pieces here because you you'll often get a bit of a separation between the the noise reduction and then not not see what you see what I mean you can see this noise reduction in the background and it doesn't look all that pleasant it can be a bit fiddly but it can be done with this adjustment brush we can show you this is at minus 100 so if I drag this back all the way to the right that's a hundred percent noise how we had it and then so so if we scroll out we've actually it's actually done a pretty good job the difficulty with the just using Lightroom is it's very difficult to get the noise out of the bird itself without introducing some weird behavior so generally I just have never ever done noise reduction to the bird itself so you can still see all the noise that's in the eye and in the plumage and the bill it's very difficult to make it so that it looks good and still has detail the background still isn't amazing so we've still got some issues going on in the background but that's the image that's how you would do noise reduction in my room so we just use Lightroom and now I'm going to show you topaz the noise and show you how quickly it can be done with this software so I've got another version of the image so we can see all the noise that is apparent so I did all I need to do is I've installed topes D noise yeah I right-click and I go edit in and topaz de noise edit a copy and it'll bring up the software okay so this is the software thought it up its and you can see straight away that it's done a really good job at removing the background we can zoom in to 200% here to have a look to see what it's done and we can use the split tool to drag to the left and to the right it's done a fairly good job and you can see that it has removed some noise from the actual bird without you know losing too much detail and the bird so yeah it's done a really good job on its own just reducing that noise so you've got three sliders you've got to remove noise and heart sharpness and recover details if we push this all the way to the right you know applies maximum noise and we lose the detail and the bird which is not what we want so we need to drag that to the left and this to recover details if you want more details in the bird you can drag that to the right often I'll go into 200% and just ultimately I'm wanting to keep details and the bird so I'm wanting to keep as many details as I can and the bird while still putting noise reduction in the background so that's looking pretty good so we're not losing too much so I'll apply that so all I've done it's opened up to a bursty noise adjusted it and I hit apply and then it brings it back up and Lightroom pretty much all done it's done a pretty good job of you know applying noise they haven't lost that much detail it's one click I don't have to do any masking at all pretty happy with that for just Lightroom there is more you could do in Photoshop but it's done a pretty incredible job straight off the bat that this is before and after so obviously this is with all the noise and this is the afterwards and see it's done the next job removing the noise it's pretty incredible really I'm not sure how it does it but you can just see the difference between the two images the noise is pretty much gone now if I show you the Lightroom version okay so this left one is topaz D noise and the right one is what I did in Lightroom it's you know ed up for the web you could possibly say it's hard to tell a difference if you still see a bit of noise in the background on this right one the Topaz have just looks a lot smoother but as soon as we go into 100% it's pretty obvious to me which is the better what better image the Topaz one just looks smoother there's definitely less noise in the background the less noise in the bird that it still got detail you can see around the eye so really there's no comparison between the two to be honest admittedly you can get away with just the bottom so if you don't want to spend any additional money that's how you would do in Lightroom and you know it's a few extra steps but you know you'll save yourself a little bit of money but if you want a one step solution or a one-click solution then topaz denoise is definitely the way to go I have purchased it with my own money and you know that's what I think of it [Music] okay let's have a look how topaz and Lightroom handle this beautiful pink Robin this was shot in the rainforest so fairly dark green background at ISO 3200 so there is a little bit of noise in that background so let's see how the software handles that so we'll do the quick D noise version first have a look at what it's done I put on the split and see if we've got it's done a pretty good job on its own it's almost giving us more detail I know there's a bit of Steel I am the bird and we can fix that but fairly happy with how that's looking I'll just see what happens if we recover details a bit see if that's any better it is looking like more details and the bird which is I'm always trying to get as many details as I can and the bird so so having a look it's done a good job so it's pretty amazing when you do the slider does a really good job of removing the noise from the background but it doesn't alter the bird too much you know if anything it's sort of added some sort of sharpening to it so I'll hit OK okay so it's done its thing and you know it's very impressive what's really impressive is how it works on these fine details these can be a nightmare to mask if you do it in Photoshop or in Lightroom where you're trying to keep the details and the perches and and the moss but get rid of the noise from the background so it saves you a ton of time that you would have to do all this manually and it would be fairly time intensive and I'll quickly show you that at Lightroom but it's done an amazing job that I'm extremely happy with and you know I would ultimately use this under J so we'll have a look at before and after so here's the before and after as we can see on the right this is with the noise and this is after that noise has been removed so it's done a excellent job and as mentioned on these tricky areas it's done a pretty good job removing the noise but keeping detail so I can't complain you know even this is quite tricky so it's done an excellent job okay let's have a go with Lightroom and see how that handles it okay so with with Lightroom zone noise reduction I'll come down to noise reduction and if we start moving this to the right we can see we're starting to you to get it sorry the computers a little bit slow so we want to move it till we're happy with the amount of noise so that's definitely got rid of a bit of noise so you know it's sort of happy with that okay so remove the noise from the background the next step is to remove any noise reduction from the bird itself so I need to create a adjustment brush zoom in so we can see what we're doing so we just need to pint why are that noise reduction so to see what's happened there it just doesn't look right and it almost gets too difficult there with them like over anyway that I just couldn't bother Photoshop gives you a lot more control with masks and selections but with Lightroom is pretty tricky so I almost just wouldn't bother doing the finer adjustments and often you can get away with that okay so I made those masked out the areas that I've done that noise reduction on Lightroom and it's looking pretty good to be honest so with this image you know really the very hard-pressed to tell the difference between the two so I'll compare them and we'll see if you can tell the difference between them okay so let's have a look at this on the Left this is Lightroom doing its own noise reduction and this is topaz did noise it's a very similar how the bird looks slightly sharper denoise tokyo's must add some sort of sharpening when you're doing that the noise process because it does look a little bit sharper so but there's a pink Robin librarians done a really good job and you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference to be honest [Music] in summation really library does it does a good job and with a little bit of extra time you can get very similar results topaz is the obviously a clear winner in relation to reducing the amount of time it takes to process your images sort of one-click and it does all the work for you so you know if that interests you and you want to save time then I would highly recommend topaz des moines so as I mentioned I have actually bought this software with my own money however I didn't reach out to them and they have allowed me to have an affiliate link meaning if the link in the description if you click on that and you do decide to purchase the software and it supports the channel and I do get a little bit of a kickback so you know if you're interested I would really appreciate that be sure maybe just a Google coupon codes prior to doing it because there are often 15% off codes for the software as of recording they have a sale on which is I think it's $20 off so I think it's normally 79 us I think at the moment it's 59 us and you can probably find a 15% code on the internet to get that down to close to 50 US dollars which you know it's a lot of money that can save you a lot of time in the long run and just removes that noise from those images quickly and easily almost with a single click okay so as I mentioned I was going to show you how to do some finer touches in Photoshop so I've got this image in Photoshop of a beautiful ring neck and oddly ring neck this will Mally ring neck this bird here this is actually shot at ISO 6400 so actually very high ISO on my 5d Mark 4 so we'll have a good book so you can see there's a little bit of noise but because we've got a light background and it's fairly well exposed there's not too much noise at all okay I'm going to use topaz D noise and Photoshop and just show you how it can do have a little bit more control so I'm just going to create an extra layer duplicate layer it's slightly different I think you go to filter topaz labs D noise brings them up the same software of same window that we were looking at in the light room but it's just that we're now in Photoshop so we'll open this up I'm going to do two layers so I'm going to do one for the background noise for the background and noise for the bird and I'll show you how to do that so this one I'm just interested in the background only so I want to create as much noise reduction on the background as I can so I'll move sharpens down to zero and I'll whack this noise all the way to say 65 and it's done a good job I can't see any noise there myself hit apply okay so it's applied the noise reduction to the background we can see the before and after so that's the before and that's after so clearly all that noise has been removed but as you can see the birds got too much noise reduction applied to it so we've got its got that painterly effect we've lost detail and that's not what we want so what I want to do now is I will select the original layer first and I'll create a duplicate ctrl J and now I want to apply noise reduction but just to the bird so I invoke topaz de noise again and I'm just interested in the bird itself so if we were to drag the slider recover slider so 265 you'll see that there's hardly any noise reduction whatsoever but it has still started to remove a bit of noise from the eye of the bird we see that if so if I was even to put the noise up a little bit what happens so we're getting some noise reduction from the eye I might just drop this down a little bit so we can see that we've got a little bit of noise reduction but not a huge amount probably just enough so I'm gonna go with that I'm going to click apply so remember I'm just trying to do it to the bird and not the I'm not concerned about background I'm just trying to reduce the noise and the bird itself okay so we're currently looking at the layer that has had a noise reduction on the bird and if I turn that off we'll see that's the before and after so that's what the noise reduction on the bird and that's before so you mainly look at the eye you can see the difference in the eye so what I want to do now that there is the noise reduction to the background as you can see quite a quite a bit has applied to the bird so we want to mask this bird so we hit the quick selection tool it selects subject and we'll see what sort of selection it makes around the bird and you can go through and make adjustments to your selections I will hit the mask tool down here and we've applied a mask I need to invert this mask ctrl I so now we have one layer so this top layer here is the noise reduction on the background and we've created a mask to reveal the layer below which is the noise reduction on the bird so currently this is how we want it we want the noise reduction bird and the noise reduction backgrounds would have blended together so this is looking good if I was to turn off that top layer you'll see we've got noisy background here okay so I'll make a couple of adjustments not show you the before and after okay so quickly just made a couple of adjustments contrast adjustments and a little bit of sharpening to the image that's had the noise reduction applied to it and I just want to quickly show you the before and after we've had noise reduction applied so this was the original image out of Lightroom you can see there's a bit of noise coming through not a lot but enough and we want to fix that so we've done the de noise we've applied the noise to the background out of the bird on separate layers and then ask them and this is what we came up with so that is the layer that has had noise reduction so no visible noise in the background and appears to be a lot more detail and the bird so quite a difference between the before and after we go way out that is the final image and that's before so a bit of a difference between the two I'm happy with that and you can definitely see in the dark areas of the bird so say on the tail here what a difference it makes quite a difference and in the wing here and on the perch so overall just goes to show what can be done from those noisy images to the final images processing we have available today allows us to improve our images and to use those higher ISO numbers you know if you have the software or you know how to reduce noise don't be afraid of pushing it up 1632 to 3200 depending on your camera I'm happy that I found the software [Music] there is just one thing I've picked up from using the software not sure why it's happening perhaps somebody can tell me if they have in the same issue at the very edges of the image is it some sort of weird banding that's going on so I'll show you what I mean so if we zoom in you can see the banding at the top of the image it happens at the top and at the bottom I'm not sure what that is and that is in the export of files so I'm having to do an additional little crop to get rid of this banding it's very small like you almost can't see it but it's definitely noticeably there and I would have to crop it to get rid of it so yeah I'm not sure what causing that maybe somebody can let me know so just as a quick conclusion we looked at removing noise from our images we compared Lightroom's built-in noise reduction and we looked at opacity noise and the conclusion is librarian does it an admirable job there's a really good job of removing the noise it's it doesn't cost you anything extra apart from subscription to Lightroom and if you don't have a lot of noise and you want help don't mind spending a bit of time masking out the part you don't want noise reduction to you can definitely get away with just using Lightroom but topes do noise it's a massive time saver it's one click do I think it's worth it yes I do but ultimately you make that decision for yourself I have purchased the software it like I said with my own money and I'll be happily using it as part of part of my workflow yes though so in conclusion it's a really good software it's quick it's easy and allows you to obviously improve your images by reducing the noise so I would different highly recommend it thanks again for watching if you like this content give it a thumbs up if you want to see more of it subscribe and please leave comments below maybe I missed something or you want to you know if you want me to do something in the future let me know I appreciate all the subscribers in the com so until next time both now thanks what do you do it are you coming down my video we're coming in on my video but another example to put it through the paces this is a white-faced hearing the noise it's a 7d mark 2 at ISO 1600 you can see the amount of noise so we've got a very very dark background and which is caused obviously a lot of noise to be present and the image and there's a fair bit of noise on the bird as well you can see it all through the bird so this should be a good challenge I'll quickly go through those steps and we'll see how how it performs so we've opened it up and just with those bass settings we can see it's done a pretty good job of reducing that noise from both I'll just increase this recovered details a little bit so what I've noticed is that this recovered details kind of trumps this noise layer so you can see the noise here if I take this for cover details down to zero we've pretty much got no noise which is understandable but if I take this to 100 we get a bit of noise it doesn't matter what I do to this noise slide if I remove noise to 100 it doesn't do anything because it's this recovered details is too strong so basically you need to adjust this recover details to a point where you're happy with the background level of noise and how much you're getting in the bird so pretty happy with that so I'll hit apply okay so this is the image after the noise reduction has been applied still a little bit but I've chosen to do it that way to maintain to maintain the detail and the bird so if we have a look at a before and after so as you can see clearly a lot of noise in this image and very little in this image but the bird still looks you know plenty sharp but we've just got way less noise as you can see throughout that image it really is quite incredible the difference so you know you've got you've got an image that had played heaps of noise which doesn't look very pleasing to one that has very little so again it's done an excellent job and it does it so quickly as well one click [Music] okay for one final test I've got to have pretty bad a noisy image that I actually didn't use I didn't use just because the amount of noise in this image I actually couldn't recover it to my liking using the system's I used so I'll show you what it is I've got this yellow throated scrubber and so a pretty cool looking bird and it's got all this food and it's built on this rock but as you can see it was iso 5000 it was with the good camera what was it I was at 5d mark 3 so my previous camera so still a full-frame camera but the noise and the actual bird itself there's a lot of noise in this image so I really struggled to fix this but I'll see how he heard a noise handles it so it's done a fairly good job but it's probably probably a little bit too much noise reduction on the bird for me I'm just looking at it so what I want to do is add some detail which is better so it's just a balancing act of going just think that from the background before you're better you start to lose get too much noise in your background so that's where it's starting so to get the noise in the background so that's so this is how I do it I adjust that recovered detail slider to the right until I'm happy with how much noise is in the background that's the easiest way to do it in Lightroom that I've found to get the most detail on the bird they still get good noise reduction on the background I'm happy with that that's done a good job so hit apply so it's done a pretty good job you can see here we've got some good details in the bird and that is definitely a usable image you would get rid of this and post but you know it's done a good job from before and after if we have a look at before and after so that's before and after I'm mostly interested in the bird the bird looks you know better and this left image you can see how noisy this images even at when we're zoomed out and but it's just incredible the you know the noise about keeping detail on the bird so it's really really good ok so now we need to apply the noise reduction and Lightroom so we come down to the noise reduction we can see a ton of noise so move this slider to the right say 50 still too much noise so keep pushing it 75 that's looking better still a little bit so keep going maybe 85 okay let's remove to fair bit of noise starting to get some weird streaking going on in the background and after you can see that it's this weird color streaking so I might have to back it off a bit yeah so that's one of the downsides a little bit of color streaking there as you can see it looks weird on the bird so we need to apply that mask to get this detail back so the adjustment brush tool move the noise to -100 and we just simply remove that noise reduction you can already see the issues we're running into the overflow so you see what I mean if you see what I mean we've got noise started to come through so I'll have to okay this is this is where we run into the major issues that there's a ton of noise and the bird and you apply noise reaction to the background it becomes obvious the difference between the bird and the background so you got all this noise and then you don't have noise in it then it's obvious that you've you know removed the noise so we need to stop that so one way it would be to that we hit the Alt key on the right hand side you've got this flow so at a hundred percent flow and if I applied that it removes it takes it back to 100% the noise reduction you can see how we've lost it here but I don't want to take it all the way back I just want to remove so we're using the adjustment brush tool I just want to partially bring back some of that noise reduction so hold down the Alt key to do - and if I change this flow down to quite a low number say 10 and if I start painting it will actually be just softly bringing back and I it's a bit hard to tell but to be bringing back some of that layer so maybe even if we increase the flow to say 25 and we tried that and now it's not quite as obvious to the eye there you know we've done noise reduction okay so I've done the adjustments in Lightroom and this is how it looks so you know we definitely have reduced some of that noise and the bird web the birds still got detailed because we haven't actually applied in the noise reduction to the actual bird so we still have a fair bit of noise visible in the bird I'll show you the difference between the Lightroom version and the topes de noise vision okay so this is the difference between Lightroom and topaz to noise look Lauren hasn't done a bad job at all and you know with a bit of effort it is somewhat possible so on the left is topaz do you know us and on the right is Lightroom so they look fairly similar you know the the noise reduction on the left-hand bird is probably a little bit better topaz is done there and it's hard to tell the difference or the transition between the noise and no noise so you can clearly see the noise and one and you know I can this feed here you've got a lot of noise and the foot so it just looks a lot better on here it's over all the and both fairly good [Music]

Channel: Duade Paton

Views: 28,533

Keywords: bird photography tips, bird photography, wildlife photography, nature photography, lightroom, How to edit Bird Photography, Post processing, Editing, Bird photo editing in photoshop, Bird photo editing in lightroom, bird photography tutorial, editing bird photos, adobe lightroom, wildlife editing, noise reduction, noise removal, how to remove noise from wildlife images, topaz denoise ai, topaz denoise ai review, topaz denoise ai tutorial, remove noise in lightroom

Id: 2uHaPn9DBXE

Length: 40min 34sec (2434 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2020