Infratech Civil

Product:  Adobe Lightroom Classic  |   Subject: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic

In this exercise, we will learn about Adobe Lightroom Classic Noise Reduction.

In this section, I want to share how you can use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to clean up any noise that may show up in your images. The example that we're going to use in this section is this example of this Xbox 360 controller. You can find this image in your images folder. 

Right now, we are in the develop module, and we've opened up the detail panel and will be working within the noise reduction area. 

In another section, I mentioned to you how sharpening and noise reduction work together. That is, the more you sharpen an image, the more noise that you're going to be introducing into your final product. Now, what is noise? You might be wondering, well, image noise has to do with artifacts that we see within the image. Image noise also includes two kinds of noise. It includes luminance noise, and it includes color noise. Those are the adjustments that we are going to be making to this image. The best way to identify luminance noise is to just zoom in to the image. You'll notice all of the splotching and the kind of green that's introduced. 

This is luminance noise. It has to do with the color values of this image. The other kind of noise that we have is something called color noise. That noise shows up in the variety of splotches of color that are within this book. I'm not sure if you can see it clearly, but there's a little bit of green, yellow, there's some slight orange, and all of these things. 

The way noise is introduced in most cases; it's because we shoot at very high ISO settings. If you want to find out the ISO that this image was taken under, you have to go into the library module, check out the metadata, and then scroll down to the ISO speed reading. You can see that this image was taken at a high ISO ISO 25 600. 

It's very, very high up on the ISO, and it's going to be very noisy as a result. Let's go back to the develop module and work now on reducing the noise. The first thing that I'm going to do is work with the color settings and ensure that the notebook has some consistent color. I'm going to zoom in, and then I'm going to play with the noise reduction and the color slider so that I can bring some sort of consistency to the yellow notebook. 

As soon as I adjust to the color slider, the other two sliders for detail and smoothness will become available. So I’m slowly moving it to the right. I'm not sure if you can see the change. But slowly, the image and the cover are becoming a more consistent color. I think I'm going to leave it like that. 

So I kind of like it. If we want, we can see the before and after look. You can see that there's just a slight adjustment. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to work with the detail, I'm going to adjust the detail. By moving to the right, I'm going to bring out more detail. If I move it to the left, I'm going to blend in all of those details. Next, I'm going to use the smoothness slider just to smooth out all of these blemishes, make sure that it's okay. That looks all right for me. I'm going to show you the before view and the after view. 

Now you'll notice that it's a very, very subtle change, and you have to look at it very carefully just to see where the noise has been reduced. 

Now that the noise slider has been adjusted, let's work now on the luminance noise reduction. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to move the slider from left to right. If you recall, luminance gives the kind of mottled and splotchy look to the image, and it introduces all this kind of green. So now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to adjust the slider. Once again, if you recall from the sharpening section, I'm going to hold on to the Alt key and slide it so that you can see how it changes using the grayscale view because it's much easier to notice that you'll notice it's blending it. It's a little bit better here. I'm going to show you the before and after view. 

You will notice that the change is pretty significant. It's reduced all of these blotches, and it has smoothed them out so that it becomes and looks better. Now, of course, I can go ahead and adjust the detail on the contrast sliders to ensure that the image becomes a little bit more consistent and goes with the look that I'm trying to work with. Once again, I will adjust these two sliders, but I will hold down the Alt key. I will adjust them as I see fit to bring out and smoothing the detail. Then just adjust the contrast just a little bit. This is the final image with all the adjustments done. I'm going to show you the before view and after view.

Another way to get the before and after view is to turn the toggle switch off, 

It turns on the panel, or it turns off the panel. Right now, the toggle is turned off. Then this goes back to the original image. It'll also show here in the history where we're enabling or disabling the detail section. 

I'm going to go ahead and enable it. Then I will zoom in to show you this is the before view and the Is the after review, and it's improved a lot. When you see it in the big view, you can notice how much of a difference it makes. So I hope this helps you understand how you can work with the develop module and within the details section to adjust noise. 

Just to quickly recap, image noise shows up when we take photos at a high ISO setting. Sometimes it also happens when we work with the sharpening and maximize the sharpening at the expense of introducing noise into our photos. Noise is just artifacts that show up in the photos. They will show up as luminance noise, which becomes grainy, modeled, and spotted, or they'll show up as Chroma noise, which has splotches of color that shows up in the images. In either case, noise is not appealing because it takes away from the impact you want the image to have on your viewer. We can quickly reduce noise by going into the detail section and using these appropriate sliders to adjust the luminance and the color. Then we can fine-tune the detail on the contrast for the luminance and then fine-tune the detail and the smoothness or the color noise reduction. I hope this has been helpful. And if you do have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out.