Noise Reduction in Lightroom & Photoshop – Made Simple

Today, I was going to be talking to you about automating noise reduction in Lightroom, but then it occurred to me that maybe some of you aren’t fully familiar with Lightroom’s noise reduction tools. So I thought I’d make a video on how to do noise reduction, and then we’ll come back to the automation of that in another video. I’m going to show you in Lightroom, but it also works in Photoshop. It’s exactly the same process. 

This is an image I shot last week in a local pub watching this band play. But when you’re shooting in pubs like this, then you’re often shooting in quite dim conditions. Although I was using an F1.2 lens wide open, I was shooting at ISO 800 to get anything like a fast enough shutter speed, in this case, 1/200s to stop the action. Shooting at ISO 800 inevitably means some noise. Let’s just move in a bit closer. 

Let’s just move in a bit closer. If we have a look on his collar here, we can see the noise. I haven’t done anything to this image, and I would always do noise reduction as my first step. Let’s just go in a little bit closer at two to one, and now you can see we’ve got all these coloured speckles in the image.

If we just scroll down in Lighroom develop module to the details panel (if you’re looking at this in Photoshop, then select the details panel at the top.)
Now, you’ve got two noise reduction sliders. You’ve got luminance and color. Color noise is all these speckles. The luminance is the sort of grainy effect you get. Let’s deal with the color noise first, because then it makes it easier to deal with the luminance element.
If I take this color slider and I slide this right across to 100%, you can see all the color noise gone. But we don’t actually need as much as that. If we back this off, I will probably find probably about 15 there is enough to get rid of the color noise.

Then we’ve got two other sliders here, the details slider, which brings back a bit of the detail. But actually removing color noise doesn’t lose that much detail, so I tend to leave that at the default setting. We’ve also got a smoothness slider. If you’ve got big areas of a uniform color sometimes increasing the smoothness can smooth that out. But it’s not making an awful lot of difference in this image. I find in most cases, I leave that at the default setting.

There we’ve got rid of the color noise, and now we’re going to address the luminance noise, this graininess that’s this monochrome graininess that’s left behind. If you move up to the luminance slider, you can see as we start to move across, then we smooth this out. The further we go, the smoother it gets. There we are – at 80 on the slider it’s just about all gone.

But if we move down to his guitar, and you can see that’s quite smooth too there. But if I just move this slider back to 0 again, you’ll see that his guitar has got a sort of crackle lacquer effect all over it. By moving this luminance slider up to 80, we’ve smoothed it out completely. Now, if I move the details slider, we can recapture some of that, but it’s nothing like as pronounced as it was before. So you can see getting rid of luminance noise is a trade-off between noise and details.

Let’s just back this luminance noise reduction off a bit to about 50, so a lot of the noise is reduced, but a little bit’s come back. Remember it’s a trade-off. I prefer to retain some detail. Now if I start moving the details slider up, you can see that comes back a bit more. I don’t have to go back to 100% to get the detail back. I prefer to accept a little bit of noise and retain more detail.

Now, we’ve also got the contrast slider. This works in the same way as your contrast slider in your basic panel, in that it increases local contrast of edges, but it’s a lot more subtle than the one in the basic panel. If we move this right and then remove it left, you can see it’s not having a huge amount of effect, but we’ve got slightly more contrast to the right. But again, I tend to leave that slider somewhere near the middle. The luminance & details have much more effect.

I would accept those settings. We’ve left a fraction of noise there to retain some detail. That’s how I deal with noise reduction. It’s always the first thing I do when I import an image. Don’t do any sharpening before you do noise reduction. Otherwise, all you’re doing is sharpening the noise.

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