Mastering the Nik Collection - 15: Dfine 2 (Intro)

hey guys this is Anthony Morgan T from online photography training.com welcome to my video series mastering the Nik collection several years ago the Nik collection of plugins was the number one set of plugins for Photoshop and Lightroom cashing in on their success they sold off to Google Google marketed the suite for a couple years with a few updates then they announced that they would not be updating the software any longer and they made it free to download around that time I did a set of training videos on the software that proved to be very popular recently the company DxO purchased the rights to the Nik collection and announced that they would be developing and updating it although it's no longer free it is nice to have a caretaker for this software because it is very good with all the good things happening with Nik I decided to update my training videos on the product this new series will be more in-depth and thorough than the previous series please be aware that I have no affiliation with the company I'm not being paid by them to do these videos and if you purchase the software I will not be making a commission on the sale with that said if you could do me a favor if you like these videos please click the thumbs up button and share them finally if you can make a donation I would greatly appreciate it that info is in the description below this video along with a link to my code of ethics statement let's get started you in this episode I'm going to introduce to you define 2 by Nik software now you can see I'm in Lightroom that's because define 2 is a NIC module that only works as a plugin so unlike the previous videos I've done on some of those other NIC modules where I could use them as standalone products you cannot do that with define to define to is basically noise reduction and actually it's very very very good I really like define - with that said I think it's the most most complicated of the NIC modules to use so it's going to take a couple videos at least in order for me to show you all the features of define - we're going to start out with this image here and we're going to be using defined - obviously as a lightroom plugin so i'm going to jump right in to define - by right-clicking on my image go down to edit in and then down to define - now the unfortunate thing about define - it doesn't work on raw images so we're going to have to then create an type of image that it will work with the default file format is tiff this is a raw file that i have here but it's going to have to create a tiff file to work in define - i strongly recommend that you do noise reduction early in your workflow unfortunately if you do use define - you're going to lose some of the advantages of your raw file because you're going to have to convert it into a tiff file so do what's needed to your raw file that is white balance a lens corrections other things that might get lost it when you convert it to a tiff file then send it over to define - so we're going to use the tiff file color space I'm going to use the largest color space avail which is prophoto RGB it just gives you the most colors available for your image there's images in a very colorful images it is but I prefer to do that 16 bits per component I'm going to leave that resolution you should do no lower than 240 when you're processing an image in any plugin including Nick most people change this to 300 if you have an Epson printer epson recommends that you use 360 so I'm going to leave that at 360 and I'm not going to use any compression I'm going to click Edit Lightroom is creating that TIFF file with those specifications and once it's created it's going to open up in define two and define two is immediately going to do some auto noise reduction so you can see right in the middle here at same working and it's over on the right you'll see there's a progress bar and it's seen annal you'll see it's saying analyzing and then when it's done you'll notice that there are some blocks on the screen or squares maybe in some cases you may see some rectangles what it did is it sampled various tonal areas in slightly different color areas of the image to see what the noise was like under those areas and then it came up with an algorithm a custom algorithm to reduce or remove the noise in this specific shot so that's why I really do like define too because it's really customizes itself automatically to the image you send into it now I mentioned there's a lot to this application so it's going to take at least two videos maybe even a third video for me to show you everything so I'm not going to go in order and show you what all this workspace looks like going left to right top to bottom we're going to do that as we go first of all I'd like to compare the previous one edited version to this version that has the noise removed so I'm going to go up here to the views and I'm going to click on this middle view where I get this bar also I'd like to zoom in and to zoom in just double click on the image and you'll zoom in and once it renders it's going to take a second to render you can see it's saying working there and once it renders I'll be able to slide this bar and we'll see this is the site that has not been processed by define two and this is the site that has been processed by define two so you can see as I go that it did significantly remove the noise hopefully that comes through in the video and you can see it another view you could use is this over top view you could click this little box right in the middle and do a side-by-side view and you'll get the exact same rendering of the image in position so you could see the noise reduction you could move it with the Navigator over here in the lower right hand corner and you could move this around and look and see how it's done and it did a pretty good job now there's still some noise in there but for on all Auto job I think it actually did a very nice job now to zoom back out you could just double click again you can see there's our side-by-side view I'm gonna go back to the single view now we got these squares it automatically did there's a lot of different things you could do here you could come in and customize where these squares are to do that go to this method where it says method and see where it says automatic right now we could go to manual and what we'll do is we'll reset click right here so it's going to remove these squares and we're going to end up with our noisy image again and then what we could do is lay down our own squares where we think they should go by clicking on this box right here and you can see our cursor turns into a little plus sign what I'm going to do is I'm going to put one here and you just draw it out so you're gonna draw your your square or rectangle and you could reposition it if you need to by going right in the middle and just pushing it around so I'm going to put one there because it's darker there that's why I'm going there and I'll put one here so what you're going to look for is different tonal values and different colors and you'll want to try to cover as much as you can and then it will come up with its own custom algorithm to reduce noise in your image what I like to do is I try to keep the square over one total area in color area meaning I won't click this and put a square across like a large area like that that in my finding of using this application does not work as well so I'll try to keep it over the same tonal ándale color area I'd rather have a lot of smaller squares on my image than a few larger squares I found that the numerous smaller squares work better so I'm going to just keep doing this and go across different colors in tonal areas in the image and we'll put one on the gorillas highlights of her face and we'll put one on the high or the more of the shadow or mid-tone part of her face although it's black it's not technically a mid-tone we'll go in the darker area and then I'll grab one and put one on her fur right there the highlights of refer over here the darker parts of refer over here and the real dark parts of our fur right down here and I think there's some really bright fur right there I'll put it right there okay now let's just for that well I'm gonna put one more sorry right here or for the sake of argument let's say I'm done when I'm ready to measure the noise click right here where it says measure noise so now it's analyzing again and it's going to still come up with its own now custom manual algorithm manual profile applied for this image now if I go up to this slider view and I zoom in by double clicking let it render it's gonna take a second I'm sorry it's taking so long to when I use the software I use to record my screen it really kind of bogs down my computer and makes things go a little slower so there you could see it did a nice job in my opinion what you'll notice though let's um I'm gonna go down to the Navigator and go over her face now you'll notice it really did soften her face quite a bit more than I like you know and I don't mind some of the noise in her face so what you could do I'll go back to the full view double click to zoom back out and what you could do is you could remove or lessen the noise reduction in specific parts of your image now to do that what you'll need to do is go to where it says reduce and where it says reduce you'll notice that there's first of all a couple sliders and you'll see that contrast noise and color noise are each at a hundred percent the range on these sliders is from 0% to 200% so being right in the middle of the range well it what I'm trying to say is whenever you do either an automatic or a manual measurement a noise and then apply it these sliders will always be at a hundred percent so if I felt that there was still too much noise let's say in the image I could come in and first of all I need to determine which type of noise it is contrast noise is just like grain and film that's what it looks like color noise on the other hand will be little color dots they're usually red green or blue and that slider that color noise slider will help eliminate those the color noise slider if I think that I wanted to really get rid of this noise I could move this to the right and then it has to render so apologize for that again and you'll see that it eventually will soften that even more now there's some different types of views you could see how it really softened it there and you could see that on her face it softened even a lot more but I wanted to let you know that there's a couple different ways you could kind of view the contrast noise and color noise application and what I mean by that is if you go up by modes and I'm just gonna show two of them to you right now we're gonna were indicted by default RGB mode which is basically our image we're gonna go down to contrast noise mask and you can see we have this gray image I'm gonna zoom back out by double-clicking on it you can see how it's uniformly gray that means it's applying the noise as per the algorithm says uniformly across the image and as I move it to the left now and I remove all the contrast noise you could see that it's really totally removed any contrast noise reduction so when I go back to RGB this is basically going to have all the contrast noise still in it if I go back now to the contrast noise mask and I move it all the way to the right you'll see we have a white screen that means the full algorithm is being applied completely to the image so hence when we went back and we saw this RGB image see how soft it is we're really kind of overdoing it so by default when you do any noise reduction automatic or manual you'll be right in the middle here so you can come in and kind of tweak the so if you think that the noises is you know not removed enough move whichever noise is not removed enough move the applicable slider to the right if you think it's a little bit too heavy move it to the left another thing you could do is you could use control points and you can see here we have a negative control point and a positive control point now I mentioned I thought that the noise reduction on her face was a little bit too heavy I'll go back to the side-by-side and you can see that it's really softened some of her features and made it kind of blurry in my opinion so I'm gonna come in here and I'm gonna put a negative control point on her face so I'm gonna click right here where it says negative and I'll put a negative control point there now as soon as I do you can see the noise is back now our area of influence again is this top slider and you can see that as I move it that circle comes in and I want it just to affect her face so I'm going to move it down we'll keep the noise reduction mostly on her fur let that come through a minute so it's rendering I'm gonna zoom back out maybe we could see a little better view of it okay and down just two and bring it out just a little more so in effect if you look here at the contrast noise slider which is the first slider and the color noise slider there all the way down it's as if I took these global sliders and put them all the way to zero and I've removed all the noise reduction from her face now you could see when we're zoomed out I think it doesn't look bad even though we know there's noise there if i zoom in and once it renders again I apologize you could see there is the considerable amount of noise there but I don't think anyone's going to be inches away from the image when they look at it they're going to be more normal laying you know normal distance from the image and you can see I think that renders much better and looks much better so I could use that negative control point now I can again come in if I want to add just a little contrast noise reduction I could move that slider to the right and it will you know add a little bit there and if I go then to my contrast noise mask you could see how gray remember when we're in the middle with the global adjustments we have this middle gray and when color noise or contra or in this case it's the contrast noise mask when contrast noise was all the way at zero we had a black screen well you could see how the black area is where the noise is being removed the darker it is the more that the noise reduction I'm sorry is being removed so it's the opposite of what I meant that means the noise is going to be there the brighter the area the more white it gets that means the noise reduction is being applied more heavily there in this case I used a negative control point to take away the noise reduction and you could see it there now if I take that noise contrast noise slider and move it you can see it's going to get more dark so that means I'm allowing more the noise to show through because I'm removing the noise reduction I'm sorry I'm being confusing with this so we also have the color noise mask and that is similar because we had the color noise all the way down as well now if I want to put the color noise at a hundred I could do it and jump in between 99 and 101 but you see now the color noise mask it's uniformly gray with the contrast noise mask we're removing contrast noise reduction from her face and that's what I want because I want more detail showing on her skin and I think it worked out well now I could bring it down to her chin as well by duplicating this control point hold the alt or option key in its alt if you have a PC option if you have a Mac and bring it down to her more nose and lips and I'm going to bring that down a little bit that so now we've removed the noise reduction from her pretty much the skin of her face and it's still on the fur and if I go up to mode again and I go to contrast noise mask you could see how the blacker parts means that I've removed the noise reduction so there's gonna be noise in those areas but because it's kind of zoomed out more it's not as noticeable and we could see the detail in her face so like I said it's a little more involved with defined too compared to some of the other NIC plugins but I think it's a very very effective plugin and it does a great job now you may have noticed I'm just gonna do one more thing on this video that there still was some noise back in here so what I could do is I could add a positive control point there once it renders I'll let it render and add one let's say right there but I I'm going to take the contrast noise and move that way up to get rid of that noise and I'm gonna the circle of influence now remember right where you put that point it's looking at tone texture and color and it's wherever that circle of influence is it's going to look for that tone texture and color and only effect that same tone texture and color but it's not fail-proof so you don't want to go out too far with too big of a circle because it will start affecting things you don't want it to affect like maybe her fur something like that so once it renders again you can see it got rid of that noise right there now I could then double duplicate this hold the alt or option key in again and bring it down to there and maybe bring another one down to here just make sure I'm not touching her fur because I don't want it to affect her fur at all once it renders you'll see that it pretty much got rid of all the noise in that area now it's going to take a long time to render so we could zoom back out by double clicking and we have those control points to remove noise so those are allowing more of the noise reduction algorithm to affect the image whereas this control point here in this one lower down on her face those two control points are removing the noise reduction algorithm which means that more noise is going to come through which means in my case here more detail is showing so now when we go to the modes and we go to the contrast noise mask you'll see now where it's black that means the noise reduction isn't happening there where it's white more noise reduction is happening there and where it's gray a moderate amount of noise reduction is happening there so that's where that in that contrast noise mask really comes in handy now I'm leave it at this for this video I am going to save it and will return to Lightroom in our next video I'm going to demonstrate how to use define to is a photoshop plugin and we're going to get a little bit into some more of the features that are available here as I mentioned it's a very involved program and I don't want to do too much too soon because I might confuse you so I clicked save down here in the right-hand corner and it will then render over here and this is our noise reduction and you can see that the noise is gone over here but it's still over her face here is the original image and you can see the noises everywhere right so here's our noise reduced image and there is our noisy image noise reduced now you could see it blurred a lot of her fur remember those control points I put on her face too to remove the noise reduction from her face I just did to her skin I didn't do it to her fur so again there's a lot more to cover I'll cover that in our next video and I'll show you how to use it as a photoshop plugin thank you everyone that watches my videos I truly do appreciate it I'll talk to you guys soon you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 13,499

Keywords: photography, photographer, post processing, adobe, lightroom, photoshop, nik, dfine 2, noise reduction, dfine2

Id: _322G_501xw

Length: 24min 38sec (1478 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 19 2019