Mastering Lightroom Classic CC - 18: Sharpening & Noise Reduction

hey guys this is Anthony Morgan T from online photography training.com welcome to my video series and mastering Lightroom classic CC in this video we're gonna take a detailed look at the detail tab that's found in the develop module of Lightroom classic CC you can see that the detail tab is divided up into two sections the top section is for sharpening and then the bottom section is for noise reduction and that's divided up into two sub sections luminance noise reduction and color noise reduction along the top you'll see at the far right there's this little triangle and to the far left is this little exclamation point what that little exclamation point is prompting you to do is to zoom in it is recommended that you zoom in to at least one to one so that you could better see the detail and the noise in your image to do that you can simply just click on this exclamation point and it zooms into one two one now up here in the left-hand panel you can see it says one to one we're zoomed in now I'll just click on fit alternatively alternatively or instead of that if you want to click on this little expose triangle you could see that you get a one to one preview right here if the preview isn't exactly over what you want it to be over you could simply click on it and drag it around to get it to be where you want it or right here is a little targeting tool if you click on that your cursor turns into crosshairs and you'll notice as I move over the image now the area in this preview changes to whatever is under the cursor so I could put that right there so you could use that as your preview to what it is you're sharpening and reducing noise of in the image personally I prefer to zoom in on the main screen so I keep this closed and for this demonstration I'm actually going to zoom in at least to begin with on for at two four to one so we could look at this edge you knew and you noticed we're using monochrome bars I think this is a good way to demonstrate what the sliders actually are doing to the pixels of your image and after we're done with the monochrome virus we will process two real-world examples so I'm going to zoom in and you can see that there's an edge we have this darker gray power and the lighter gray power and when you sharpen an image all you're actually doing is adding edge contrast and if I go to this amount slider and move it to the right you'll see that is exactly what is happening the darker gray bars edge is getting darker and the lighter gray bars edge is getting lighter so where they touch each other you get this higher contrast edge and that in effect makes your image look sharper now below that is radius if you look at this edge you can see that that darker edge has a definite width to it and lighter edge has a definite width to it if I go to the radius slider I'll make that width wider if I move that to the right if I move the radius slider to the left I make that with narrower by default radius is at one that stands for one pixel so it's at one pixel width usually that works fine I'd say for 90% of the images I do a radius of one is perfect there are instances though where you may want to move the radius slider if you have say a seascape image and there's no detail in the image it's just the sea the sand and the moon may be off in the sky and it's distance so there's no detail you'll find that it will look better sharpened if you move the amount slider to the right and then move the radius slider to the right as well so you're making any edges like a thicker edge contrast but that tends to look better on an image that isn't highly detailed on the other hand if you have a photograph of the close-up of an eyeball and the iris is highly detailed and you want to show all those little star a striations and veins and things in the iris I would suggest you take this radius slider and move it to the left it will give you a better sharpened image that but again a radius a 1.0 the default position usually works fine below that you'll see there's a detail slider this is kind of like a turbo boost for the amount slider as I move it to the right you can see it's making those edges even more contrast II it's making the darker even darker and the lighter even lighter if I move it to the left it kind of makes them less contrast II so but its default position of 25 usually works fine for most images you could come in and play with it and see if it helps your specific scene look better but usually I leave it right there below that is masking and we're gonna use one of the real-world examples to demonstrate masking and what that is you could actually mask out parts of the image that you don't want to be sharpened and these gray bars won't demonstrate that so we're gonna do that in a second below that is noise reduction and I'm going to keep a mount way up and details so we could see these edges and also this is a JPEG image that I just found on the internet and you can see it's got a lot of artifacts here and typically with you when you sharpen an image you'll often sharpen noise and you'll sharpen any artifacts that are already there it is recommended usually that you reduce noise first in an image then later sharpen the image usually you want to reduce noise very early in your workflow then sharpen very late in your workflow now with that said with Lightroom it doesn't really matter everything is self contained in the single tab and everything here works together so it doesn't matter if you dial in a sharpening of 50 let's say then go down to noise reduction and in dial in a luminance noise reduction of 60 or if you do it the other way around and you do luminance noise reduction of 60 first then go up and do sharpening a fifty second it won't matter it's going to look exactly the same because these sliders all work in conjunction with each other even though they're divided up by section now with that said if you use an external program to reduce noise do that very early in your workflow usually right after you do some basic adjustments and maybe some tone curve adjustments send it off to that external noise reduction program reduce noise then when it's back in Lightroom continue your processing do whatever other tabs brushes whatever you want to do then sharpen it before you export so sharpen it last that usually works out best now as far as this noise reduction luminance slider you'll notice when I move it to the right it just kind of blurs out anything that would have noise which it doesn't really have in this image but we have these artifacts and you can see how it just kind of blurred those out and what you're not seeing either is it actually will soften some of the detail if you find that you move this slider to the right and it's softened some of the detail you could rescue the detail with the detail slider now this is a very subtle adjustment you may not see what it's doing but as I move this to the right it is adding some Idi Khan edge contrast back as I move it to the right I could barely see it on my screen so I'm not sure it's translating to the video conversely if I move it to the left it's really kind of blurring out everything a little bit more and I think you could more readily see that the default position of 50 usually works great on most images and you leave it right there contrast I'm not sure you'll see here and sometimes when you add luminance noise reduction to an image the image will get softer and lack in contrast a little bit and this is a very subtle contrast slider it adds just a very little bit of contrast to your image and you can't even see it do it on these gray bars so that's the functionality of six of the sliders so far now there are there is this color sub section down here and I'm going to show you that when we work on the Eurasian Lynx but we're going to jump over to this image here of this cityscape and I'm going to show you my sharpening and noise reduction workflow for an image like this and in doing so I'm also going to be demonstrating the masking slider now typically what I like to do is zoom in on the main image like I said and I usually like to zoom in to one to one and I like to have something that is detailed in the shot as well as something that has a lot of noise in the same shot so I could accomplish that right here and I could see the noise and I could see the building that has some brick detail that I'd like to preserve now I did mention that it doesn't matter in Lightroom whether you sharpen or do noise reduction first but still personally I like to reduce noise first and then sharpen afterwards it just is the way I do it and it doesn't really matter now we're not we don't have any color noise really in this image so I'm not going to cover that yet but we have a lot of color image in our color noise in our next image so we'll cover that section in a second so what I will do is do noise reduction first and I will simply move luminance to the right and as you can see as I move this luminance slider to the right it just smoothes out the noise so there it is at a hundred and there it is at zero but what it also does I told you it tends to wipe out a little bit of the detail as well look at the bricks you could just see the bricks here this was shot at ISO 3200 so there's there is a lot of noise but look at the bricks here as I move it to the right we're starting to lose that brick detail so there is a happy balance we have to try to figure out what works and what doesn't work so I will move this to the right and I'm going to introduce you to masking in a minute and I'm not gonna worry about the sky because we're gonna mask that out from sharpening in a minute so I'm gonna move this to the right and just look at the brick detail and I want to make sure I'm preserving that so noise reduction let's say around 45 looks decent I could come in with this detail slider move that to the right and try to rescue some of the detail in those bricks it doesn't seem to be doing it you'll find that quite often it won't work so I'm gonna leave that its default position sometimes if I add a little contrast it will add but that doesn't seem to be doing much either so nine times out of ten maybe ninety nine times out of a hundred all I'll have to move is the luminance noise reduction slider and what I often will do is I'll find a point that looks good to me in this case it's 45 then I want to kind of zero in a little bit so I'll go up ten so I'll move it up to 55 and it did reduce more noise and it didn't lose too much detail so 55 might be a little better so let me go up a little higher let me go to 65 now 65 it's starting in my opinion to wipe out at least too much of the noise are too much of the brick detail for my liking so I had it at 55 I'm now at 65 so what I'll do is I'll split the difference and see what 60 looks like and 60 looks pretty good so I think 60 is where I'm going to keep luminance noise reduction and then I could come back in and see if detail does anything and or contrast and it really doesn't so next we're going to sharpen the image and again I would like to be over something that I want details so I'll move this to the right now as you see as I move the amount slider to the right it's enhancing the noise I don't want that right we don't want that we could mask it out though from those areas to do that with sharpening above zero go to your masking slider hold your alt or option key in its alt if you have a PC option if you have a Mac then click left click on the masking slider and you'll see the entire image is white white is indicating sharpening wherever there is white there is sharpening so the entire image is being sharpened as I move it to the right we're introducing some black into the sky and into the other parts of the image now those areas are not being sharpened so we have no sharpening where it's black but we do have sharpening where it's white so you could kind of mask it away masks are sharpening away from the sky so we have a pretty much mostly all noise reduction up here in the sky and sharpening everywhere else with noise reduction so if that made sense so that's one way you could kind of select selectively apply sharpening to an image remove it from especially images that have expansive skies by using this masking tool now when you do sharpen and reduce noise some people find it easier to do it if the image is not in color and what you could do is hold that alt or option key in and when you're down here reducing noise let's zoom back in click on that hold that alt or option key in and click on let's say luminance noise reduction you can see we have a black and white image so this could better help you dial in that certain specific happy point for luminance noise reduction and it will do the same thing when you click on detail click down hold that alt or option key in you'll have that black and white image and contrast same thing so that helps you help some people at least reduce some of the noise likewise when you're sharpening the image if you hold that alter option key and you want to adjust the amount it will go to black and white if you want to look at the radius a little more closely if you hold that alter option key in and click in you'll get this kind of odd look and you could see the edges a little better and I think you could more readily see that as I move the detail slider around those edges are getting more enhanced we're also enhancing the noise a little more too so you got to be careful with the radius slider I'll leave it at its default positional one I'm going to keep holding that alt or option key in and click on the detail slider and we get that same kind of view maybe will help you better enhance detail in your image and we covered that masking already so personally I only use the alt/option key trick again it's alt if you have a PC option if you have a Mac I only use that for masking I don't use it on any of the other sliders if you want to use it for the other sliders you're gonna have to sit down and get used to it to understand how like this look translate to the real image and it takes a little practice so work with that and see if you could better utilize that little trick of the alt/option key to your advantage now we're gonna jump to another image this image has some color noise and for this image I'm going to zoom in to four to one and I'm gonna drag it over here and you can see there's a considerable amount of color noise up here in the sky so typically again I like to reduce noise first so what you'll find with the color slider is it's super effective it will be you'll have these as you can see these kind of red green and blue dots in the noise and you'll move it and they're gonna be there be there and then all of a sudden they're gone like that they're gone they're gone like at 11 kind of move around make sure you get them on a little bit maybe over in here still yeah so like between 11 and 18 they're gone you don't want to go too far if you go too far you'll start to reduce the saturation in the rest of the image so you need to be very careful with this slider just keep moving it very slowly and if your computer lags a little you're gonna have to go a little extra slow just keep moving it until they're gone and then leave it at that if you find that you move this color slider to the right and it made you lose some detail you do have a detail slider which works identically to the detail slider that's in this luminance section you move it to the right you'll rescue some detail move it to left and you'll kind of blur the image a little more so you could use that we also have a smoothness slider often especially with very high aiya so you remove the noise but it still looks very grainy and the smoothness slider will help do that in a very subtle way so usually you'll find that the default positions at 50 for both those sliders is fine so I will get rid of color noise first then I will go up to noise reduction and do some noise reduction and I want to make sure I'm not obliterating detail so I will either try to be zoomed in to a point where I could see detail and an area that I know has a lot of noise that I need reduced to make sure that I'm moving that luminance slider to the perfect spot so that it's getting rid of the noise adequately but not wiping out detail so then I'll do that then I'll jump up to sharpening and I'll keep that same zoomed in amount usually it's one to one I can see the cat's eye which I want that detailed but I want noise gone over here so I'll use move the luminance noise reduction you can see it's working much more effectively on this image and it reduced the noise pretty good there and we didn't lose ton of detail here if I did I could try bringing the detail back with the detail slider which is in the luminance sub section of this tab and I could try adding a little contrast if I lost it I'm going to leave those at the default positions then I would go up to sharpening and I would keep the same zoomed in amount and I would sharpen many times I kind of drill down to where I need any of these sliders especially the amount the sharpening amount slider and the luminance noise reduction slider meaning I will move it till it looks good I think it looks good let's say at 70 so then I will say okay let's try 80 did 80 look better did it enhance noise too much well it enhanced noise too much so I'll go back down to 70 sometimes maybe I'll split difference I'll go to 75 75 still looks like it added too much noise so I'll go to 70 again then I'll go the other way I'll go to 60 that's the way I do it it's a little time-consuming and tedious but it seems to work best sixty-five actually looks pretty good so now I got it between 65 and 70 so I'll kind of look at 70 look at 65 and I kind of like it at 65 so I'll just leave it there that usually works fine that's the way I would go about doing it I would do the same thing with radius detail as well we don't have to do any masking in this image so I think it's fine so it's something that I think if you're printing an image or if you're selling an image you want to be very studious and careful with these sliders and make sure that you get it so that you're reducing the noise enough so that it it's got the noise at least reduced so that it's not a distraction and you're not wiping out detail and you're sharpening the image enough and not over sharpening it or not enhancing any noise that was still in the image so in those instances you want to be very careful with your detail tab on the other hand at least for me nine times out of ten I'm just sharing the image online and I'm in a very you know I'm in a hurry I don't really I'm not really worried that much about sharpening and noise reduction so what I'll do in those instances I will just quickly sharpen somewhere around 70 and noise reduce somewhere around 40 and that usually works fine for you know computer screens phone screens for people to just look at the image again though if I was printing the image to sell or if I was selling the image for something then I want to be much more careful with these sliders now an alternate way to go about doing sharpening and noise reduction is to forego this tab completely so I'm gonna reset these settings by holding in the alt or option key and you can see that sharpening turns into reset sharpening and I could click on it so it reset those settings or you could just double click on that name instead of holding in the alt or option key just double click on noise reduction and you'll reset the sliders now you can't reduce color noise with the brush so you have to do it here so I'm gonna leave those alone but what many of us do especially for images that have a very strong subject and that would be like a wildlife image like this is we will selectively add noise reduction and selectively add sharpening to our image with brushes now this image I should say I did do some basic processing already a tone curve already and that was it I think lens corrections lens Corrections were done to it nothing else was done to it except for I added one brush is I brightened up the eyes of the cat so that was it so what many of us do is we'll go to this on this brush and you'll notice there's a sharpness slider and a noise slider so anywhere we want to remove noise like if i zoom in by holding in this the shift or the yeah the shift key or not the shift key the spacebar I could zoom in and I could see that there's a lot of noise over here then what I'll do is I'll take this noise slider move it to the right get a nice big brush for this demonstration you can see I could now I got mask I got the mask overlay on so I'll turn it off and you could see that I'm smoothing out that noise so this is another way to do it and I just wanted to make sure that I covered it now by the way I would have feathering somewhere between 50 and 90 somewhere in there usually it depends on the image though flow intensity or at a hundred when I do this and auto mask is off so then I would just use the bracket keys to size the brush right and remove the noise wherever I want the noise removed and let's just for the sake of this argument do it from the background that's behind the cat not worry about this hammock that the cat is in I'll turn that back on and if you make a mistake remember you could just hold the alt or option key in and you'll temporarily switch over to the erase tool and then you could adjust those settings and get a bigger brush and you could erase it from wherever let's say you you made a mistake and we covered that in another video so you could then reduce noise so let's say I did it wherever I wanted noise reduced now I want to sharpen the actual links to do that I would get a new brush double click on the word new reset the settings by double clicking on the word effect coming here with sharpness turn sharpness up get a brush that fits now I have the overlay on so I could see where I'm painting and I'm just gonna do a really sloppy job and I again I'm not I don't use auto masks so make sure Auto mask is off and make sure density and floette are a hundred and that's good so now I sharpened where the cat is I'll turn off the mask overlay and so that's an alternate way now I just arbitrarily move to each of those sliders you of course would want to zoom in to one-to-one and look at a part of the cat like its eye and then come in with the sharpness and make sure the sharpness is set right zoom back out go to your noise reduction brush by clicking on the little button to make it active zoom in to that we have the noise you know up to 89 you can move it around try to look at somewhere at the same time that is that is detailed if possible click in here and make sure that you're reducing noise but not making Connor acting against your sharpness brush that you just brushed on so I just wanted to show you this brush trick that many of us use for images that I have very very strong subjects in them we want to reduce noise and sharpen the image selectively with the brush that often works best so I hope that helps you and you know everything you know need to know about the detail tab so you could sharpen in noise reduce your images properly thank you everyone that watches my videos I truly do appreciate it I'll talk to you guys soon you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 32,715

Keywords: photography, photographer, post processing, adobe, lightroom, photoshop

Id: rY6eV5ow7PU

Length: 27min 20sec (1640 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 05 2018