Hi guys, welcome back, it's been a very very long time - I think it's been like
seven years since I last did a video so, yeah, this has been a long time coming
we're gonna look at reducing noise in a noisy picture today - we're going to use
this picture of Piper, now Piper is in the room with me at the moment as are
two other collies, so if there's any background noise that will be them! We're
on a laminate floor so if they walk about you will hear them, I'm gonna try
and cut out anything that's too loud but just in case it doesn't work
particularly well there might be some background noise - If you like what you
see in this video please do subscribe, it means so much to me and now that I'm
back the more people that subscribe the more videos I will do! I've got content
planned for the next six months so let's just go ahead and see how that goes. You
guys also just let me know how this screen looks for you, we're working on a
5k 27 inch iMac so I need you guys to let me know if you
need me to scale this screen down a bit so that you can see all of the intricate
little details of what we're gonna be working on so like I said we're going to
be looking at this picture of Piper, it's the only picture I've got imported into
Lightroom at the moment, this is a raw file, it was shot on a nikon d800 i
believe and Piper was seven months old at the time. So we're gonna jump right
in, i'm gonna show you the level of noise - I'm really hoping if you've got
this in HD, click on the COG and put it up to as high quality as YouTube will
let us go today I'm hoping that you can see the noise it's in the background on
this shot of Piper it was shot in natural light as you can see there is
natural light coming at this side it's slightly cool and then there's a lamp
behind her which is throwing yellow light so there's a bit of a mishmash
here now for the purposes of this video today all we're gonna be looking at is
that reduction of the noise now because this is a 5K screen I've zoomed
into 200% essentially because at 100% you can't
really see that much but that's just you to how zoomed in this will go on this
screen so stick with me a little bit all we're going to be looking at today is
the noise reduction I will edit this whole photograph and I will post it with
all of the different tools that I use but that will be coming in a few weeks
time so stay tuned.
to remove noise it's not that difficult people get a little
bit confused - when I open any image up I will increase the level of
sharpening on that image as standard which does bump up the noise so I'm gonna
increase both the radius sorry let's start at the top, the amount of the radius
and the detail just a little bit to add that level of clarity I'm gonna do
before and after so that's before... after... crazy difference already in what was
already a sharp image remember I am zoomed in at 200% here but what that's
done is that's given us more noise so you can see the noise let me go to a
darker part always noise is worse in dark areas that's over here now if I was to
go ahead and increase up my shadows a little bit which is something that I
normally do do and drop with the blacks and that gives you an instant punch on
the photograph and what that also does is it adds more noise so the noise in
this image is quite small but this technique will work for everything so
what we're going to be doing is we're going to be using this detail section
here, let me move that up so it's about halfway up the screen, and we're going to
be using these little tools under the noise reduction section now there are
some tips and tricks with using these the absolute basic level would be to
increase the luminance up to say 10-14 that kind of an area so that will do
probably quite a big thing really in knocking out that noise, so that's without
that on... if you look at this area of the image here... and then that's with that so
what that does unfortunately is it also knocks off a little bit of that
sharpening that we put on this so what we want to kind of do is add that back
in a little bit and the way we can do that is using these other sliders now if
you hold down your Alt key on Windows or option key on a Mac whilst moving these
sliders around it all goes a bit weird. As you can see so it goes into
black-and-white which really lets you get a handle on the noise and the detail
so what I'm doing here is I've just positioned this photograph in an area
where I know I've got a sharpness in detail specifically this you know her
eye bogey situation and an area of what would be quite a lot of noise so we've
got this area over here and we've got this area here which is quite noisy so
what we're going to do is we're going to hold down our alt / option
key increase the noise reduction until that kind of like the noise disappears
which is kind of there it's really not that bad and that will show
you in black and white then we're gonna go ahead and increase the detail slider
and what we're doing in this section is we're looking really at the areas where
there are hard edges so
if you see the difference, so look
at the hair on her forehead over there on the left hand side look at it now and
then now do you see the difference adding that sharpness back in now obviously
if you max it out we're gonna have quite a lot of noise we added back in I'm
gonna just leave it pretty much halfway through which still leaves this area quite
soft if you look it's just sort of like meh yeah, you know, yeah. All we're
gonna do is go ahead to this contrast one, I'm gonna hold down the Alt
key again/option on a Mac, and I'm gonna add a little bit of contrast back in
there and that's done a nice job of adding some back. I'm gonna zoom out,
zoom in, mmm... it's not quite right for me so we're just gonna go ahead and
play a little bit back on that one, and a little bit up on that one, and there's
not a great deal of colour noise in this one I'm gonna see if I can add a little bit more
detail back in without overcompensating on the noise - yeah it's different for
every single photograph so you've got to be really careful to not overcook the
situation
It really is very different - you can hear my Mac fan has just turned on in the
background... it's like waa I can't cope! We're gonna undo and look at that noise!
Awful right, and we're gonna turn on our detail tab... look at that difference! Oh
beautiful. If we were to go ahead and zoom in to a hundred percent which is
over here, you cannot see any of that noise - it is all gone
that is a pretty good starting point to look at just how far you can get really
I mean you can see the noise from here I'm really hoping you guys can in these
dark areas if you look up here if you look here in this little you know
crevice area you can see the color noise going on in there and then we pop
our detail sliders on that and it just softens it right out. Perfect! Remember if
you like what you've seen in this video please please please please please do go
ahead and subscribe to this channel, it means so much to me - I know I say that a
lot but it does - and any feedback, comments, anything like that, please drop them
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comment is the best comment, I will pin it to the top - that's a promise - so I
really look forward to seeing you guys soon
and let me know if you have any questions! Enjoy your weeks!