if you're processing micro four thirds raw files in lightroom don't touch this slider without
watching this video first this is one of several common mistakes that can ruin the quality of micro
four thirds raw images in this video i'm going to show you what these are and explain to you
how to avoid them using the shots from my previous video if you're wondering about shooting landscape
photography with micro four first cameras be sure to watch that one you'll find a link to it in the
youtube video information a common mistake made by people switching from a larger format to micro
four thirds is that they expose for the highlights in the scene then in post-processing they open
shadows to reveal hidden detail this is completely the opposite of what you should do using micro
four thirds as you'll see with this image it's a bracketed sequence of handheld shots and i've
selected an underexposed and an overexposed frame starting with the underexposed image i'll
increase the exposure and open the deep shadows the first thing to notice is that it creates a
horrible color cast in the shadows now let's zoom into the shadow areas in the corner of the frame
look at all the noise and poor detail where i've tried to recover the shadows
now compare this to the overexposed image first there isn't any colour shift in the
shadows and i don't need to recover them zooming into the corner of the frame at 200% magnification
there's much less noise and far better detail the difference in image quality is like night
and day but the problem with this image is that it's overexposed and has blown out highlights
but watch what happens when i use the exposure and highlight sliders i can fix the problems and the
image looks great if you want to achieve the best quality processing from your micro four thirds raw
files remember to expose for the shadows and not the highlights now for another example that also
has a noise problem if i zoom into the sky at 200% magnification the blue areas of the image look
terrible this is happening even with the default sharpening and noise reductions in lightroom
and if i turn off the color noise reduction it makes the problem even worse
this happened even though i was shooting in bright daylight and it's probably one of the reasons why
people criticize micro four thirds cameras but the problem isn't the camera it's the processing look
at the detail panel in lightroom this is applying a default level of sharpening to the entire image
and it's exaggerating the noise in the sky in a moment i'm going to show you how to avoid this
but first let's exaggerate the noise to make it easier to see by increasing the sharpening now one
solution to prevent the noise becoming exaggerated is the masking slider which is something a lot
of photographers just ignore this limits the sharpening in lightroom to concentrate onto just
edges and keeps it away from areas like the clear sky if you hold down the option or alt key on your
keyboard as you move the slider you can see what's happening where the display is white it means that
the sharpening is being applied to those pixels in the image as i move the masking slider to
the right you'll see areas of black develop which aren't being sharpened what you need to try to do
is balance the sharpening so that you don't exaggerate the noise in the sky but you still
sharpen the image the problem is that you won't be able to remove all sharpening from the sky using
only the masking slider that requires a different approach which i'll share with you in a moment but
something else that i can try first is applying a small amount of luminance noise reduction
to smooth out the sky i don't want to apply too much because it can ruin the detail in the ground
and make it appear too smooth now that i've added some noise reduction let me show you how to apply
selective sharpening and noise reduction this is what you should be doing when you process a
micro four thirds raw file i'll start by selecting the sky using the new masking tools in lightroom
now i can reduce the sharpening slider to minus 50. this is the magic number that removes all
the sharpening we've applied in the detail panel if you use a lower number than minus 50 you'll
start to blur the image so try to avoid this notice how the sky appears much smoother when
i make this change the other thing to try with the sky selection is to increase the noise reduction
the noise reduction slider here works in conjunction with the noise reduction
sliders in the detail panel this cleans up the sky nicely and we can even go back to
our detail panel to increase the sharpening there applied to enhance the landscape detail
this allows us to create a sharper detail in the landscape but without exaggerating the sky
so don't be lazy and make sure you apply sharpening and noise reduction selectively and
remember we've been looking at the image magnified at 200 percent whilst applying these changes
if i zoom out to 100% magnification you can now see the difference this makes to the image quality
having refined the sharpening and noise reduction it means i can apply another special slider that
i like to use with landscape images it's the day slider when you apply a dehaze adjustment
it changes the contrast in lighter areas of the image and it can make the sky pop but
there is a problem with the dehaze slider that's often overlooked which is it exaggerates noise
in this image it's not causing a problem though because of the changes i make to the sharpening
and noise reduction but see what happens when i turn off the adjustments i apply to the sky
noise becomes exaggerated all over the sky but there's something else to consider when you're
processing micro four thirds raw files whilst lightroom makes a reasonable job of the raw
processing it's not as good as some of the raw converters like capture one and dxo photo lab a
good solution is to pre-process your raw files using software like dxo pure raw this produces
a dng file using deep prime noise reduction and optical corrections when you then process your dng
file with lightroom you can achieve a much better result look at the difference pre-processing has
made to this image even increasing the dehaze slider you don't see noise in the sky whilst
i've done this using dxo purer you can achieve the same results with more control using dxo photo lab
in fact you can even integrate dxo photo labrador processing with lightroom as i explained in this
video if you want to achieve the best image quality in lightroom you should watch that next