Presets - Noise Removal
I’ve been using Lightroom 2’s noise removal sliders more and more lately and getting some decent results. I won’t lie. Personally, I still go to Nik’s Dfine for my heavy lifting when it comes to noise removal but LR does do a good job when the noise isn’t quite that bad. One of the issues I’ve had is that tiny little preview in the Detail panel in LR. Normally, it should be easy enough to adjust the sliders without presets. But that detail panel is just too small and I usually wind up zooming to 100% view in the main window. I found that having a few presets to just click on became more useful to me so now, you have ‘em too. On a side note, I also noticed that the low/medium settings worked well for most photos. I also threw in just a bit of sharpening to each one so keep that in mind as well. Have a great day!
• Click here to see a sample of the preset.
• Click here to download Matt’s Noise Removal Presets
• Click here to see a video on how to install presets.
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on November 11th, 2008 at 11:17 am
is it a mistake that the three luminance presets are only different in their sharpening?
luminance-noise-removal is always 35….
on November 11th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
I like having LR’s noise removal. It’s nice to add a mild noise reduction before export. Presets are great for it since you can just apply them to your edited images before export and not effect anything else.
Then like you said, do the heavy lifting with a plugin. I like Noise Ninja and neat image the best myself.
Gav
on November 11th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Matt, Yes, thanks for the tops. I find this LR features works nicely on RAW with my ultrazoom (Pany FZ8). But for jpeg processing it basically does nothing (even though my in-camera setting is fully minimized.) That is not really a surprise as jpegs are already “baked”. So, with the very noisy jpegs I get from this small-sensor camera I unfortunately have to export from LR2 to PSE5.0 where I use a Noiseware plug-in. Other than noise reducetion, I find LR2 works very nicely with JPEGS.
Peter F.
on November 11th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
nice!!! very handy!
on November 11th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
I agree with you Matt about the teensy size of the Detail preview.
I get around this by using my Macbook as a second screen (to my main screen, an Eizo CG241W) and leave it on 1:1 as I narrow my editing choice for the ‘Send to Client’ selects.That way I can use Survey mode with three to four up at a time and have a live and large preview to help weed out the ‘not quites’.
on November 11th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Thanks so much for another great set of presets. I love the day in day out workflow related ones. I’m always looking for ways to speed up the everyday processes. I love the creative ones too, but seeing what you’re doing in this area really is helpful. Thanks!
on November 12th, 2008 at 5:30 am
mmm, as on ‘old’ TriX user I am a little cautious about using too much NR as it robs the image of its punch, or something. This is a hard one to justify but everything is just so smooooooth these days that I sort of back off a bit. What do you guys think?
on November 12th, 2008 at 7:33 am
@captain spin: i agree about noise reduction…and i usually even refrain of sharpening - in any stage of the process…actually, there is no such thing possible as making an image sharper after it has been recorded by the camera…the only thing that “sharpening” (in any app) actually does, is increasing the contrast between adjacent pixels…it’s all a matter of taste and trends, i guess.
on November 12th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Thanks for the presets, Matt!
Regarding sharpening/not sharpening… The anti-aliasing filter that covers the sensor in digital cameras is what causes soft images (excluding inferior lenses). It isn’t a matter of being “trendy” to sharpen an image. When you sharpen, you are restoring the sharpness that was basically removed by the AA filter in the camera. Remove the AA filter and your images will be sharper out of the camera, but there will be some aliasing as well.
John
on November 12th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
I’m with Captain Spin on this one. I use NR only to reduce the really big noise of shooting at 3200 (and sometimes 1600) because it takes some of the punch, or edge, from the image. In my opinion, Matt, you went waaay too far with your sample image. The NR’d version has lost quite a bit of detail—look at the eyebrows and lashes.
on November 12th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Hey Matt,
I do a lot of HDR, and if I dont use the noise reduction in LR before exporting I get a lot of noise with photomatix, so yes LR noise reduction works well for me and it is the only one I use, you can see some exemples:
http://www.photoserge.com
on November 13th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Chiming in on this again - on the other hand, with a low ISO image (200 or 400) that is nice and sharp, a NR setting of 20 or 25 makes skin look really smooth and nice without reducing apparent detail (like in Matt’s example pics). I tried this last night and was pleased, so I guess I am switching to a “in certain circumstances this is cool” position. Gotta keep an open mind and not get stuck, right?
on November 14th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
I always LIKE the noise. Noise is a friend, noise give a life to pictures. I always give this as example -one of the best films Ilford Pan 400 (white, magenta, pink letters): http://www.pbase.com/cameras/ilford/pan_400
check NOISE - visible, nice and gives life….
on November 16th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
This is an interesting area to create presets for, because I feel the noise reduction sliders in LR2.1 hardly do anything at all, even with both at 100. I wonder if this is another bug in Lightroom (like post-crop vignette looking so poorly).
on November 17th, 2008 at 4:33 am
Does this work within Lightroom 1.x for mac?