The Quintessential Guide to Sharpening and Noise Reduction in Lightroom

hey guys this is anthony morganti i am mr photographer.com you probably know that there are a lot of great apps available today that you could use to sharpen and reduce noise in your image if you follow my channel you know i've done a lot of videos on different apps that do just that one thing i think that's getting overlooked though is that lightroom actually does do a very good job on sharpening and noise reduction and in most instances lightroom will probably work fine now over the years i've experimented with different sharpening and noise reduction techniques in lightroom and i think i've kind of refined my process so that it works really well and i'd like to share it with you in this video and explain how sharpening and noise reduction works in lightroom now of course if you're in lightroom in the develop module the detail tab has everything you need sharpening and noise reduction and what i would recommend you do is that you work this tab from the bottom up start by removing color noise first then luminance noise then sharpen the image afterward i found that that usually works best not so much the algorithms in lightroom but actually just your eyes the way you're looking at the image get rid of the noise first get rid of the color noise first and then you could more effectively remove the luminance noise and then once you do that you could most effectively sharpen the image so that's my finding now what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to kind of zoom in on the image first and you of course could just click on the image and zoom in there is also a little navigator window if you click on this little triangle here and roll it open you can see that there's a navigator window here you could drag this around or you could click this little tool right here and then you could click on the image itself and center that navigator window where you want it now in my opinion the navigator window just isn't big enough uh for me it just doesn't cut it so i always keep that closed and i zoom in on the image now usually when you click and zoom you're only zooming at 100 percent and if you have a really high resolution image like this one it's not going to zoom in that much so what i prefer to do is hold in the command or control key and then just draw a box on the image where you want to zoom in now i could zoom in and really see the noise and how sharp the image is now i mentioned we're going to work this uh detail tab from the bottom up so we're going to get rid of color noise first and if you look at the image you could see that there's a lot of noise and there's a lot of like blue dots i think the blue dots jump out but also there's also red dots and green dots and that's color noise and very simply all you need to do is take this color slider and slowly move it to the right and you'll be surprised watch watch the color dots as i slowly move this to the right you'll see they just disappear very quickly look at that not much of a movement at seven it looks like they're all gone now many cameras raw files when you import them in lightroom they're going to default the color value to 25. you may want to make sure that you don't just accept that because it's probably too much as you could see i got rid of the noise on this image or the color noise on this image at around seven or eight so just do it there you might want to drag the image around and just make sure that it did remove the color noise especially in the darkest areas that's where you're going to see the most color noise then once you're satisfied with that you could take a look at the two sliders below it detail and smoothness now detail sometimes when you remove color noise you're kind of blurring it slightly this detail tab will help you bring back that sharpness if you move it to the right now it's a subtle adjustment down here in the color section so kind of look at the bird's feathers maybe in here and as i move it to the right you'll see that they'll switch slightly now move it to the left can you see that all the way left all the way right all the way left all the way right all the way left all the way right maybe look around the bird's eye hopefully you could see that in the video all the way left all the way right now smoothness it should be um in my opinion probably called anti-smoothness because it works backwards from what you think if you move it to the right you're making it less smooth so in in this instance you're actually kind of making it sharper so if i move it to the right it's sharper if i move it to left it's not as sharp now this is a more subtle adjustment maybe look in here so it's it's not a big like adjustment these two sliders as it co as it applies to color noise reduction so you could see that all the way up all the way down all the way up all the way down so you could kind of move these around and try to see if you could just bring back some of that sharpness sometimes when you do that you'll start to reintroduce some of the color noise i see a couple blue dots up there so i'll just move that a little more to the right to help eliminate those uh color dots that i saw so that's really as simple as it is to reduce the noise reduction as far as the color side is concerned now the luminance side um again i like to zoom in just like this look at the noise and i like to look at a part of the image that should be very sharp in the case of a wildlife you know as an animal the eye right we want the eye really sharp so we're going to go to the luminance noise reduction and we'll just keep moving that to the right and you can see that it just kind of smooths out all that noise but in doing so look what it's doing to the birds it's bird itself you're losing some of the sharpness of the bird so it's just kind of smoothing everything out now this is where those aftermarket apps like to noise ai pure raw and pretty soon on1 is coming out with a noise reduction application as well this is where it will get rid of all those that grainy looking noise without sacrificing sharpening so that's where those actually work better in lightroom but there is something in lightroom that will help you bring back that sharpness so what you should do is move this luminance slider to the right until you just smooth it out enough now remember you're really zoomed in so if you move back out it it doesn't look as bad right but when you're zoomed in it's more dramatic this detail slider that will again like the detail slider in the color section of the noise reduction part of this tab will bring back detail when you move it to the right so you can see as i move it to the right see how it's bringing back that's feather detail if i move it to left you're removing that detail so that's a little more dramatic of a shift than the detail slider that's in the color section okay so you could see that so we could bring back some of that um some of that sharpness now we start getting a little bit more noise you can see there's a little bit of artifacting up there but again when you're zoomed in everything's magnified when you're zoomed out it's not not even noticeable uh contrast similarly if you move that to the right you'll start to bring back some this actually should be called micro contrast in my opinion if you look at the background which was very noisy until i used move the luminance slider to smooth it out if i move the contrast slider to the right you'll see how it's starting to add micro contrast around the what was the noise in the background so that is just kind of bringing out more detail but in effect at times especially on an image that like this that had a lot of noise it's going to bring back something that looks like noise all right so we want to probably avoid moving the slider too much try to do try to rescue your detail with that detail slider more so than this contrast slider in most instances now remember you don't have to get all your sharpening back with this slider we have the sharpening section of the tab to work on as well so we don't have to worry about making sure we get all that sharpness back right away just bring back enough before we start introducing some artifacts up here in the background maybe just back it off all right so just like that so we've reduced noise color noise and luminance noise in the image just like that now let's talk about sharpening and i'm going to come off this image just for a minute to try to give you a an idea of what sharpening actually does what these sliders do and to do that i'm going to go to this set of monochrome bars and what i'm going to do is i'm going to get it again holding the command key on my mac control key on a pc and zoom in kind of in here all right maybe you know what we're going to zoom in even more zoom in like this like a lot all right now we're looking at this transition edge from a darker gray bar to a lighter gray bar and you can see that there's some lines in there those are just like artifacts from the jpeg from the compression of the jpeg there's nothing i could do about those in reality this should be a uniform dark gray bar butted up against a uniform lighter gray bar compared to it so that's what we see here now let's look at what happens when we move these sliders what you're doing when you're adding sharpening is you're actually just adding contrast to edges and to show that i'll move this amount slider to the right and watch the edge right where the gray bar the darker gray bar touches the lighter gray bar and you can see that it's just making the darker gray bar a little darker and the lighter gray bar a little lighter so it's adding contrast right at that edge and that in effect is sharpening now what do these other sliders do let's go to radius if i move that to the right it's making that area where it made the darker gray bar edge a little darker it's making it bigger a bigger radius whereas the lighter gray bar it's making that one larger as well if i move it to left it's making those smaller so you're increasing or decreasing the radius of the edge that gets that micro contrast added to it now in a real world application let's say you have a macro photograph of a peach i mean a really tight photograph and you have the fine little hairs on the peach fuzz shown in the image you may in that instance want a smaller radius because those hairs are really fine on the other hand if you just have a landscape image default might be fine because it's not going to make much difference so what you really need to do is zoom in like i i did here and move this around and see where it looks most pleasing and then often zoom back out so that you could see the image like as it should be and make sure that this radius adjustment is adjusted properly now the detail slider if i move that to the right it just makes doesn't change the radius but it kind of does the same thing the amount slider does it just makes that the darker part darker and the lighter part lighter if i move it to the left it dials it back so you could see what that does now masking i'm going to explain in a moment because it's hard to show in this in this uh image of the monochrome bars so hopefully this gives you an idea what these top three sliders do again amount just at the very transition edge it just makes the darker edge darker the lighter edge lighter radius makes the edge wider and detail does almost exactly like a mount does maybe a little more dramatic makes the darker even darker the lighter even lighter so you're adding more sharpness when you move it to the right now let's go back to the image of the bird all right again we're going to zoom in right not that much let's hold in the command key again on my mac and zoom in like that okay now again you could zoom in when you do these adjustments and then what you're doing is when you move this a mount slider and you move it to the right you're just adding that kind of um contrast to the edges now when you're doing that see how we're kind of increasing the noise so then you might want to jump back down to luminance and play with that a little bit luminance noise reduction i should say and move that to the right so you could just kind of move those edge to edge see what it does radius remember we're going to increase the radius of that high contrast edge we just added with the sharpening slider when i move that to the right so you can see how it just kind of really makes it kind of sharper when i move it that way less sharp to the left in this instance so just find a happy place for that detail is kind of does the same thing the amount slider does it just makes it sharper but look it's really introducing this kind of weird digital noise that we don't want so we might want to just back that one off all right so we'll just kind of find a happy medium again zoom back out and see what it looks like and you could turn uh this entire detail tab off with that little switch right there and that will give you a better idea of how you're doing on the image so i think that looks pretty good right there now masking typically you don't need to sharpen the entire image you don't need to sharpen every pixel right we just need to sharpen the bird we don't necessarily need to even sharpen parts of the bird that are uniform like the edge of the this part of the beak here or maybe the iris part in here that doesn't really need to be sharpened just the edge and the background we don't really need to sharpen so what masking does it will remove sharpening from smoother areas where there isn't a lot of like contrast between edges now the best way to see masking is hold the alt or option key in on your keyboard alt if you have a pc option if you have a mac and when you do that and then click on the slider you'll get a totally white image when the masking slider sliders all the way to the left that means every single pixel is being sharpened as i start to move it to the right you'll see black start being introduced wherever black is that's where we're not sharpening anything so if i keep moving it to the right you'll see that i'm starting to remove the sharpening from the smoother areas and i'm just concentrating on those edges now why you want to do this is remember when we were zoomed in and i was moving like the radius slider to the right and this detail slider to the right i was introducing this weird digital noise and it was most noticeable in the background you can see the background it's not there because we're not applying any sharpening there now it is on the bird because we are applying sharpening to the edges of the bird so you could better apply sharpening exactly where you want it applied when you use this masking slider and i suggest you are zoomed out when you're doing this masking adjustment holding that alt option key and do it so it's just getting the edges now i know um i was on instagram and i saw an ad for a person that was selling a lightroom course now i can't comment how good his course is but i the little ad was him sharpening an image and what he did is he moved masking so it was just the edges and then he took the amount slider all the way up now you may want to try that per in this case here you can see this weird digital noise i'm getting so i don't think it works well on this image but i'm not going to discount what he's teaching i'm just want to bring that up that if you stumble across that don't think that that's a formula that you could do on every single image as you saw in this image it just didn't look right so you'd prefer probably not to do that on everything just you know pick and choose and see what works now to help you sharpen you know that little alt option trick i did with the masking it also works on the other three sliders as well so if i hold in the alt option and click on the amount slider i get a black and white image sometimes it's easier to sharpen when you're just looking at a monochrome image so you could better see uh the edges kind of get that color out of there so it doesn't like muddy things up for lack of a better term and it also works with radius but in a slightly different way you get this kind of weird uh look where you could see edges better and you can see as you move it you can see you're getting thicker edges right that's what radius did so you could kind of maybe get a better adjustment that way same thing with detail hold that alt option key in and you get that same kind of weird kind of edge look that you could do with detail as well now personally i don't do that with the alt option key on the amount radius or detail slider only do it with the masking slider that's where i find that it works best now i'm going to back off radius on here i'm just i'm going to now sharpen this like the way i normally would something like that and if we do a before after there's before and there's after so it it really does do a pretty good job of doing noise reduction and sharpening now i will say that those aftermarket applications probably do a better job for especially higher iso image like like images like this one is but if you just have you know a quick thing you need to get done this works fine you don't have to take the time to send the image into you know denoise ai or pure raw or i forgot what the um on one's noise reduction is going to be called that's coming out uh as i'm making this video it's supposed to be coming out in two days and i'm looking forward to checking that out as well but in many instances lightroom noise reduction will work fine now in closing i just want to talk about this all to option thing again i used it or i showed how you could use it for all four sliders in the sharpening section it also works for the three sliders in this luminance section of the noise reduction again if you zoom in and you hold in the alt option key and click on the luminance noise reduction you can see you get this black and white image if i hold in the alt option click on the detail i get the same black and white image if i hold the alt option and click on the contrast i get the same black and white image so it does work on those three as well you may find that that helps you better remove noise in an image when you do that it does not work or as as i recall it does yeah it doesn't work on these three only on the luminance noise reduction ones so that's i hope that's that is hopefully everything you need to know to more effectively sharpen and reduce noise in your images using lightroom thank you everyone who watches my videos i really do appreciate it i'll talk to you guys soon you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 12,625

Keywords: morganti, anthony morganti, photography, photographer, post processing, adobe, lightroom, photoshop, tutorial, photo editing, how to, noise reduction, sharpening, clarity, structure, lightroom cc, adobe photoshop lightroom, how to edit photos, adobe lightroom cc, landscape photography, professional photo editing, lightroom editing, edit, how to use lightroom, how to edit like, how to edit travel photos, how to edit, how to edit photos like the professionals, how to edit in lightroom

Id: 5drBD-Q2LkY

Length: 20min 51sec (1251 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 04 2021