Comments on: Presets – Noise Removal

By: Amelia

Amelia — Mon, 10 May 2010 18:25:57 +0000

Matt you are so wonderful :0) Thank you

By: Dean

Dean — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:09:14 +0000

This week I had a night shoot for a magazine and needed to shoot as high as 8000 ISO on a Nikon D3. You can imagine what the results are like before post prod. well alot better than my Canon 1Ds which its noise is like golf balls.
I find Lightroom doesn’t deal with noise very well. Capture One is a little better. Canon’s PhotoPro and NX2 are excellent for noise reduction.

Exporting original tif’s into photoshop then using a mixture of noise reduction and sharpening filter technics then as a last step after all your post, use Noise Ninja. The auto profile feature is pretty good. I often will fade the NNinja reduction by 50% to 70% using the edit—> fade feature immediately after NNinja.
These steps also work well with HDR technics. (Ramelli nice HDR shots)

By: iWynx

iWynx — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 08:33:50 +0000

Does this work within Lightroom 1.x for mac?

By: Kevin Williams

Kevin Williams — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 23:19:17 +0000

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).

By: perrobg

perrobg — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:55:23 +0000

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….

By: Greg

Greg — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:41:56 +0000

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?

By: Ramelli

Ramelli — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:17:11 +0000

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

By: Greg

Greg — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:42:45 +0000

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.

By: John T.

John T. — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:21:13 +0000

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

By: Patrick De Smet

Patrick De Smet — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 11:33:19 +0000

@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.