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One more really excellent feature in the Develop module, is Lightroom's ability to help you take your digital images and remove noise from them.
Now, noise is—really when you think about it, it's got to be part of our lives as digital photographers. In most cases, it probably doesn't do anything to the quality of the image. You don't even notice it. You move on. In extreme cases, it can ruin your images and make them look grainy and sandy.
So what causes noise? Well, noise can be caused by pushing the ISO of your digital film to an extreme to take images, say, in a low-light situation. So you're out there trying to take a photograph of something in low light. It strains the sensor. And the sensor begins generating all of these artifacts, and you get a noisy or sandy or grainy-looking image.
Now, I have this one right here. I have a philosophy. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. There are a lot of images we could use. This one is an extreme. You say, oh, nice, Andy, it's a big, black box. It's a night photograph. I tried something. I shot at an ISO of 200, which is very low for night photography, in the hopes it would help reduce the noise. And guess what? It didn't, because you're straining the sensor.
I can't really see too much right now. So I'm going to go up here into basic. Let's do one thing in our work flow. Let's lighten it up a little bit with exposure. Let's get a little bit more of that image so we can see something. And then let's come down to detail right here, and you will see noise reduction. Now, you've got two areas. You've got luminance right up here with detail and contrast. And you have color with detail.
I usually start with color. But unfortunately, the image isn't big enough for me to see anything yet. So, if I click here, this button, it gives me a nice, 100% shot. And there's a star right there. That's good. Now, I can move it over here if I want to, and maybe get a different position. Or I can click here, and move over into the image to get an area that I want to work with. Say like that.
Now, I can also do this. If I come over here and collapse that, that changes to a warning. It's saying, Andy, you don't have near enough zoom on that image over there, if that's where you want to work, to see any noise. But if you click me, I'll help you. So if I click this button, it basically gives me a 100% view.
Now, let's actually leave it right there. Because the reason I chose this image is stars, to me, look like noise. Yet, it does avoid them when it cleans it up. Why? Because noise is predictable. It is a mathematical effect of low light in straining a sensor. Lightroom understands that and it builds it into the algorithms to remove the noise and leave the details if it can.
With that said, let's leave it here for a minute. We have color. That's usually where I start. Color is set at 25 and that's the default. If I take it all the way to 0, watch the image. I get a whole lot more color. Now, what color does is try to blend areas, saying, okay, these and these and these areas should be one color. So as I go this way with it, it begins pulling some of those areas together. It really does help.
I usually use color somewhere between a 20 and a 30. Somewhere in that general area. And I watch the image as I'm doing it. Detail is just how much detail to put back into it after you've decided the colors. If you do too much detail, it begins putting noise back in thinking that you think that's detail. Now, the default is 50. Most of the time, actually, that's pretty good. We'll leave it there.
Now, luminance is really going to help now. Because now that it knows the colors to blend together, luminance can help smooth it all out, and at the same time leave, in our case, the stars. And if we go to luminance right now and start pulling at it this way, watch. Look at how it's smoothing that out. That's absolutely brilliant how it does that. Now, we can do a before and after right up here. And that is quite a difference, I want to tell you.
Now, detail does the same thing. It will start bringing back noise in thinking that you think it's a detail. So you have to play with that based on your image. And contrast will add more contrast. But I find if I use it—I'm not a big fan of contrast—it will start to bring back some of the noise. So I usually leave contrast alone and I usually don't mess much with detail.
Luminance and color are the two that I use. Let me come over here. If we move over, say, here, you will notice that even the trees—now, they swayed a little bit in the wind, so they're not perfect. But the details are here, yet the noise is gone. That is quite an impressive image for the severity of the noise that's in the image. If we take it back to fit, there you go.
Noise reduction in images is very intelligent and it's very selective because it's predictable and Lightroom knows how to fix it. If you've got noise in your image, this is exactly where you want to go.