Mastering the Nik Collection - 17: Dfine 2 (Odds & Ends)

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 this is the 17th video in my mastering the Nik collection video series and my third video on define - if you're totally new to define - this isn't the video you want to begin with because in this video I'm just going to clean up some loose ends that I haven't covered in the previous videos about define - in the description below this video though you will find a playlist for the entire mastering the Nik collection video series and you could find the the module you want to learn about and pick the first video for that module there's around 2 or 3 videos for each module and I have more to go after this video as well but go to episode 15 as far as defined 2 is concerned and you'll learn everything you need to know by watching episodes 15 16 and 17 you'll learn everything you need to know about define - now one more little housekeeping thing here I've received some complaints people are saying they're not seeing the noise when they're watching the video in my videos when I say here's the image with noise here it is without noise they're not seeing any change whatsoever well rest assured I'm recording these in high-definition I'm uploading them to YouTube in high-definition when I stream them from YouTube I could see the difference I could see the noise there's a lot of other factors that work into this that are beyond my control most notably your internet connection if your internet connection is slow or just at the time you happen to be watching the video happens to be on a line that is very busy like other people in your home maybe you're streaming Netflix or something youtube senses that and they will send a lower resolution version of the video you could override that if you go to the YouTube video itself and you go to the lower right hand side you'll see there's a little gear here if you click on that gear you the very last choice is quality if you click on that you'll notice that I upload it at 1440p that's the highest quality and YouTube may dumb it down all the way to 144 P and in that case it's going to be relatively blurry and you won't see the noise I guarantee you won't so if you're not seeing the noise click on the gear and pick a higher quality and hopefully it will stream properly to your computer so you could see the noise that I'm talking about now back to this video we're going to work as a photoshop plugin again and in this episode I want to work from a smart object now I have done that in previous videos with other modules in the Nik collection the advantage of working from a smart object when you're in Photoshop is you could go back in after you do all your adjustments and define to go back to photoshop if you decide you didn't do enough noise reduction or you want to do more noise reduction you could go back in and and pick up pick up right where you left off so it kind of remembers your settings and you only could do that if you work from a smart object so I'm in Photoshop I'm going to duplicate this background layer by hitting command J on my Mac if you have a PC you hit ctrl J now I want to make this layer a smart object so I'm just gonna right click on it and I'm going to go down to convert to smart object and it will take a second to do that and when it does it will have a little square in the corner of the postage stamp of the image on that layer and that's indicating now that that is the smart object now I'm ready to go I could send this in to define too so I'm gonna go up to filter down to Nik collection and then down to define too and when I do this it's gonna come up with a warning now you'll remember from previous videos on other Nik modules when you're working from a smart object in Photoshop it's going to disable that brush button that is only in the Nik plugin when you work from Photoshop and I mentioned in previous videos that that brush is relatively worthless at least in my opinion so it's no big deal it's gonna get rid of that brush that's fine we're gonna click OK and then it will now open up into fine too and you'll see that it's analysing and for some reason that came in Zoom but anyway it's analyzing as it normally does it will automatically analyze your image it's an automatic mode by default and it's going to apply a profile now I'm gonna double click to zoom out okay and it's I see it has a couple boxes here it has one here one here one here one here one there that's it I think so that's okay umm that's alright but you know that's fine with me because for the sake of this video like I said I'm just gonna clean up some loose ends so I'm gonna double click on it to zoom in and again if double clicking isn't zooming in make sure you're on this arrow when you're a parent in this tool well make sure you're on the arrow and I'm gonna double click like right there so we're zoomed in and you're gonna have to forgive my computer it's gonna have to take a minute to render but once it renders hopefully we'll see the image with the noise reduced and I'm just going to accept the default because for the sake of what I'm going to be showing you in this video this will be fine so here's the image with the noise reduced now I'm going to click on this preview checkmark and there is with noise and there's without noise so it did soften the noise considerably there is width noise without noise and I could go over here and I could do like this split screen thing and you can see over here snowy's there's no noise so it did um it did in my opinion do a decent job eliminating the noise now a few things I haven't talked about yet is what I want to show you now there's drop down here where we have modes you'll notice that it has this red green and blue and I didn't talk about these yet the way you would do this is this will show you the noise that is on each channel to do it first of all you want to click off preview so you're looking at the image with the noise then go down and let's go to red now this is the red Channel so it's giving us a rendering of the red Channel and you could see the noise that's on the red Channel now we'll go down and we'll go to the green Channel now it's gonna render the noise for the green Channel then we could go to the blue Channel and you can see there's the noise for the blue Channel well what's the advantage of doing that well in this case the noise was relatively even throughout all three channels sometimes though you'll find that one channel will be considerably noisier than the other two I found this most often with blue when I do landscape images particularly for some reason with my Fuji cameras and if I'm shooting a landscape image and it has an expanse extensive blue sky with my Fuji camera I'll see often the blue mode has a lot of noise in it this will better help you target that noise by then going to the arm the color ranges noise reduction and you could better like target that noise at least help you target that noise and that is the idea why you might want to use these um these color channels to view the noise now again you have to make sure preview is turned off or turn you know so you could see the noise and then those channels work below that we have luminance and chrominance noise remember in previous videos I mentioned there's two main types of noise one is luminance that's the most common noise that looks like film green and to look at that again you have review off click on luminance and it will give you a rendering of the image and you could see the luminance noise below that is chrominance and when you click on that that's gonna give you that color noise remember color noise usually is like a little red green and blue dots and it's not as common and you'll see in this image there is none I don't see any red green or blue noise again make sure preview is off when you do this so I don't see any chrominance noise so what that is telling me now is that I could um I could come in here and go let's say the manual or I could go to reduce I'm sorry and I could go to wear this color noises and I could probably take this all the way down because it's not making any difference so then I'll go back to RGB and then I'll click on preview to get rid of the noise and I you know so I don't any color noise reduction that was being done was being done an image that didn't have any color noise so all it was probably doing was softening the image so that's where these modes come in handy now I covered the contrast noise mask on the color noise mask in the first video now the last thing I want to talk about is if you go over here and you're in this reduce tab you'll notice down here there's a more expose triangle if you click on that you'll see there's some more like sliders and check boxes now this part I I'm gonna venture to say you're gonna have a hard time seeing you know even if you have the best stream possible because quite literally I have a hard time seeing these I went through about a dozen images to try to find one that I could best demonstrate these and this was the best image I could come up with I just didn't have a lot of images that were conducive to demonstrating these choices now really when you do a noise reduction on an image you tend to soften it and particularly around the edges and where little hairs might be coming out on the edges you'll start those hairs won't be as well-defined anymore if you want to try to bring those back if you click this edge protection Chuck box what it will do is will hopefully bring back a little bit of more detail in those edges especially what I found hairs so for hairs you'll start to see them a little better defined if you'd like to try to get them even more defined take the slider and move it to the right and you get a way for it to render again I'm sorry and hopefully it'll get those even more defined hopefully you could see that in the video I could barely see it actually in real time right here now with that said if you turn or move the slider to the right or if it's even in the middle at the default position if you're seeing it's introducing a little bit of little bit too much noise then you'll want to take it to the left and of course light wait for it to render and then hopefully you could find that exact you know happy place for this slider where it is giving you some nice distinct edges of objects that are in your frame as well as still reducing the noise now jpg art of art effect reduction a lot of times with JPEGs and you actually will get this with TIF files too but it's more common with lower resolution JPEGs generally speaking you'll get little block little like like little like I know little squares and rectangles and especially around high contrast edges and sometimes you'll see this too in an expanse of blue sky you'll see the sky looks blocky and what you would do then is you would click this box and it's just a one click box no slide or anything and that hopefully will reduce that jfet a jpg artifacts and again you'll see that what I found with older cameras tended to get that introduction more so than newer cameras for some reason I'm not sure why that has anything to do with the JPEG when you're shooting we're all let's say but that's what I found Adi banding a lot of times if you have a high contrast a vertical or horizontal object in the image let's say like a flagpole or a telephone pole going vertically straight up church steeple something like that it kind of will get this banding on the edge and if you click here you could i'll help eliminate that banding and if it's vertical you would click on the vertical if it's horizontal you would click on the horizontal most images wouldn't have both they'd have one or the other and that's a good thing because you can't control both meaning if I click on vertical right now and I take this slider and I move it to like 200% then if I go back to horizontal it's still at 200% now you can't it's not two separate settings one for horizontal one for vertical it's one setting for one or the other or both I mean it's just the way it is so this is the little bit of a extra like loose ends I wanted to take care of I do apologize I didn't have a great quality image that I could properly demonstrate these I looked and looked and I really didn't have anything in my sixty thousand image Lightroom library for some reason and this was the best I could come up with so hopefully that still helps you better understand how to use these controls and make them work for you now the last thing I want to show you is once you're done let's just say we're done we click OK now it's going to apply the filter to our smart object and once it's there you'll notice now that it's called a smart filter and it has a mask so I could go to this mask and let's say that I didn't want the noise reduction applied to a specific part of the image so I could click on that mask and then I could get a brush hit the B key on the keyboard and since it's a white mask if I want to mask out the part where I mask out the effect I want to mask out the noise reduction I need to paint in black so I'm gonna click hit the X key to put the black as the foreground and I'll get a bigger brush a little bit and let's just for the sake of demonstration say I'm painting at a hundred percent opacity this lion cubs face and now I'm asked out now III visa I don't even see the effect here but the idea is you're masking out the effect from the lion cubs face you could see there now you don't have to paint at a hundred percent let's say for the sake of argument let's back that out that you just want half of the noise reduction on the lion cubs face but you wanted a hundred percent everywhere else then take your brush and take it down to an opacity of let's say you know fifty percent and just be careful you don't go over your brush stroke and just like that and then you could just put it on fifty percent so you're now when you look at the mask you see it's gray it's not black anymore so some of the noise reduction is being applied to the Cubs face so that's one advantage of doing this in Photoshop because you could apply a mask and you can do that mask not just to a smart object you could do it to a regular layer as well so we could do this exact same thing and I did demonstrate in the lab that in our last video but we want to come back in here and readjust anything right here where it says define to just double click on that and it will automatically open up back and define to and it's going to remember what we did so it's going to come in with those same settings that we had and then we could kind of take up right where we left off now we got to wait for it to render and do its thing but once it does any second now you'll see that the checkboxes I checked are still chucked over here because by default those are not chucked usually but now let's say I could take that off and I could take that off I could take that off and then when I'm done I could click OK and it's going to come back and it's going to remember even my mask and everything so it allows you to go back in and readjust something that you you know after you brought it in Photoshop maybe you said oh you know I got to change something and you're able to do it so that's really I think between these three videos the last three videos so 15 16 17 minutes hopefully everything you need to know about define - again I apologize I couldn't really find an image that worked perfectly for this video so hopefully it this still helps you with your images and we only have a few more modules to go and by you know maybe the end of the week I think we'll tackle another module in the Nik collection thank you everyone that watches my videos I truly do appreciate it I'll talk to you guys soon you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 5,370

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

Id: CTigir3clTk

Length: 20min 11sec (1211 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 05 2019