Noise Reduction in Adobe Camera Raw

hello Blake Groot is here with that 64 Academy in f/64 Lee and in today's tutorial I want to dig really deep into Adobe Camera Raw noise reduction features which are very similar to those features that are in Lightroom if you'd like to follow along there but what I want to show you is how to reduce noise and either images with extremely high ISO s or areas in your photograph where you expand the dynamic range in those shadowy areas and you get these really crunchy noise things here so here is me before and we've got some really crunchy deep nose in there and here is the after we will find it really well and the settings that we use here look extremely high but we're doing them deliberately to get the most detail out of our image without sharpening our noise so whether you're shooting in high ISO s or you're trying to recover shadows and your images you're going to come up with noise so in this photo not the greatest photo at all actually exactly what I did was I walked over to that door over there I opened it up and I took a shot of outside with the hole inside at about a negative 1 exposure value so the inside is really dark and the outside is bright I had my focal point right here on this test target that you see on the wall and what I'm going to do is I'm going to increase my shadows and my exposure so I can start to even out this image so we can bring about that noise again this is not a perfect photograph and that's not what this is meant to be for this is meant to learn this is meant to learn how to reduce noise in Adobe Camera Raw okay probably the same thing in Lightroom here because the controls are practically the same so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and press Auto let's see what Photoshop wants me to do here then I'm going to boost up those shadows a little bit so I can even out my exposure between what's outside and what's inside I may even go as far as to drop those highlights in the back there okay I'm kind of reversing the exposure here when you notice what when we do that the this area here gets really really noisy and the further we bring up those that exposure the noisier it gets okay so I'm going to bring that down to about 2 point okay so we're going to increase that exposure value by about two we'll bring down these shadows just a little bit I'm going to go and I'm going to make this fit in view I'm going to go over here into the detail section and this is where you reduce noise so what is it for this tutorial before I started with I reduced all of the sharpening and all of the noise reduction because what we're going to do is not just look at noise reduction we're going to dissect it so that we can actually understand it and use it on our images all right that's the beautiful thing so here first things first let's start with our noise reduction okay we're going to do anything with sharpening right now because we don't want to sharpen our noise because if we turn on sharpening right now will essentially be battling the sharpening with the noise reduction so do noise reduction first then hop up into sharpening so we're going to look at all of these different sliders and what they do because I know I used to be a victim of this I see this go case slam when we put that up to about 52 let me put the luminance detail to about here as when we reverse those I don't go to noise oh that's it I'm done well that's not exactly how that works okay so let's go ahead and reduce all these and we'll zoom in to the test target that we had as our focal point so we're zoomed into the test target let's go to move up this luminance if you move up the luminance you'll notice that that starts to kind of take that crunching noise and just start to pull it all together so it's almost like a blur it's like a very small blur so if we bring those luminance up to about let's say 50 okay now we have the luminance detail and that is how much detail is in the noise that you're reducing so if we bring this up you can see that as we bring this up we start to get more detail out of that noise but we're fighting the reduction that we did with the noise reduction up here in the luminance section that's because we're telling it okay I know you reduce the noise here by blurring this a little bit but now I need some detail resurrected there and that's okay we'll continue to fumble with these in a second here okay and by fumble I mean we'll get to know it let's go down here to color because one of the things it really is killing us right now is the color noise and this slider right here this color noise slider might just be the ticket in most cases if you move this color noise up look what happens we're take the color out of that noise we're basically just telling it to desaturate all the color that's coming about in the noise that right there usually fixes up our noise pretty well and almost most of the time when I'm doing noise reduction like this sometimes I don't even take the luminance or the luminous detail up too high I just go right there to the color one and take out the color because sometimes I like the grainy feel that I get from that noise and and in actuality we used to call this stuff film grain okay now we call it noise so because it's called noise it has a negative connotation we got to get rid of it all of a sudden but in reality it's film grain and higher ISO back in the day when we had film meant more grainy photos and sometimes people really aspire to have that grain and their images I know I did when I was shooting with ISO 800 film let's zoom back in here to our test target and go back over some of these other adjustments here so what you'll notice is this is a textured wall okay there's a textured wall and there's also some highlights that are right here some little pockets of highlights that are on this little telephone here like I said this isn't the most beautiful image to work with but it's great for this noise reduction tutorial so it's coming here to the luminance contrast I want to just go ahead and move down here a little bit we move up the luminance contrast let's look right here we're going to take it even deeper dive into this as we move up that luminance contrast look what happens we're starting to pull some of the luminance detail out of the contrast in the image so those little highlights that are reflecting off of this textured wall start to come about because sometimes when we're working with noise reduction we can flatten things out in the process well this luminance contrast adjustment in the past I thought it did nothing but you have to zoom in really deep in order to see what it's doing here so remove this luminance contrast up to about the 50 mark and we come up here and look at our telephone on the wall look at how we can see some of those details starting to come back okay so let's go ahead and fit in view and see we've got here looks like it's it's alright but let's go ahead and zoom in a little bit more and look at the color detail and the color smoothness okay so color detail is how much detail is left in the colored noise as you move that up so if we bring the color down let's take two about right here and we bring that color detail up your start to see that in these areas of noise here that zoom in real close in these areas of noise where there's color noise you can see that that color noise is getting a lot of detail especially like right here on this one we're zoomed in by sixteen hundred percent right now but look at the color detail you can start to see how the color starts to get crunchy or when that details higher so we really want to do is just really reduce that color noise that is in there and here with color smoothness this we have a color smooth it down to zero this is almost like a color blur where you can see we still have some color here at sixteen hundred percent when we move that color smoothness over you start to see if that color starts to disappear the problem with our color smoothness and our color sliders here is that sometimes that can actually reduce the saturation in our image when we're using them so we do have to be a little bit careful with those as reason in this image is not that big of a deal at all so let's go ahead and zoom in here I know we're assuming in and zooming out here but that gives us a good idea of what we're working with let's look at the preview here was the before and here's the after we just really solidified that noise we pulled it all together but we didn't blur it to the point that it's not there anymore we didn't take our luminance all the way up here and say okay get rid of that noise because look what happens when we do that it really does blur our image instead of reduce the noise and what we want to do here is not get rid of the noise but it's reduced the noise the key words there reduce the noise because you're not really going to be able to get rid of it anyway okay it's there it's not going anywhere but what can we do to reduce the effects of it and this is looking pretty good like we have it right now we can still pull out some detail here because if we look at this test chart here we can still pull some detail out of this test chart and we do that with the sharpening so one of the things I want to tell you about here is the alt or option key which is our best friend when we're doing anything in this noise reduction area as a matter of fact if we press alt or option we click on luminance it changes our image to a black and white image which it helps it's only doing it temporarily it's just giving us a different view of our photographs and of grayscale photograph and why is it helpful well sometimes it can be difficult to see exactly what it is that we're doing when we have all that color stuff there when we press alter option remove that luminance it gives us a better idea because it takes what something like I don't know 12 million colors and reduces it down to 256 which really helps us when we look at our noise reduction but the same thing happens up here with sharpening we move the sharpening amount up you can see that now we're sharpening all the little micro details in our image we're pressing alt or option on like to see our sharpening and it doesn't look very good like that but look at how much I can bring that sharpening up I can bring it up to about 50 okay and then I can go to the radius I can press alt or option on the radius and the radius shows me just about how much is actually being affected by that sharpening it takes is the size of the pixel and it brings it up so now we're at point five pixels essentially if you look over down the right-hand side and now we're saying that the radius of this sharpening will encompass about three pixels so it will grow that sharpening by about three pixels let's bring it down to about here to the one point to mark the detail slider this is where things get kind of tricky if you bring detail up it's going to make it's going to sharpen up really quickly and really fast we press alt or option you can see but look what happens we get some artifacting when we do that that white and black artifacting which kind of negates all the stuff that we did with our noise reduction so let's just bring that down we don't need to bring in that detail but one of the really key things I want to show you here at the masking and I'm going to zoom out here fit in view and we press the mask and move this over it doesn't look like it's doing anything does it it doesn't at all but if we press alt or option we click on that mask move it over now look what happens this is our grayscale image but this is a grayscale mask so anything that is black here is not going to be affected by the sharpening the noise reduction is still happening in those areas but it's not sharpening those areas so we can really get finite with what our sharpening is doing we only want our sharpening to affect our detail areas anyway which would be that test target and maybe some of the areas around outlines or something like that here we're sharpening the entire photograph here we're sharpening just the detailed outline areas our image so now if we zoom into that test target or zoom in the test target we press alt or option you can see what we're doing here here is where you can maybe increase your radius maybe increase your sharpening amount maybe increase the detail here because now it's not affecting the noise it's only affecting areas that we have masked off which are going to be your areas of detail or your areas of outline so here's the overall before and here's the after we've reduced that noise successfully reduce that noise in a controlled fashion and it looks much better than I did before okay now if you look at these noise reduction settings these are actually really high for most cases you won't have to take your noise reduction to this extreme but if you look at what we did here if we go back to the very basic area of this image we were able to pull out two whole stops of data from the shadowy areas in our image and then on top of that we also increase what we can see in those shadows so in those shadow areas we're probably increasing this to about three whole stops of light so we're recovering a lot here and that in the process of recovering that we have to go into the noise reduction settings here and really get into the nitty-gritty of this noise reduction in most cases you won't be taking your noise reduction that's high this is showing you how to reduce the noise on extremely high ISOs or those areas of shadow that you resurrect in the basic adjustments of Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom so don't just slam those sliders all over the place do things for a reason so again my name is blake Garuda's with f/64 Academy and f/64 elite if you like this please give it a thumbs up share it comment on it maybe tell us some of the settings that you use for noise reduction and finally subscribe if you subscribe to this and you hit a little notification button there you'll get updates when new videos hit my youtube channel I just want to thank you for taking the time to watch this tutorial and expand your horizons in your creative passion thank you very much [Music] [Music]

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 37,130

Keywords: Adobe Camera Raw, How to redeuce noise, tutorial, photoshop, Blake Rudis, f64 Academy

Id: RTu7Cl5Zpg8

Length: 13min 28sec (808 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2017