Least Noisy Adjustments?

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mldiggs

mldiggs

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Hi All,
Here are a few questions for folks:

Have you determined that some adjustments are more likely to result in noise than other adjustments? If so, which ones do you tend to avoid for that reason?

Here's why I ask: I generally work my way down the adjustment tools, occasionally doing some adjustments that might be somewhat redundant (i.e. boosting blacks and then boosting contrast). When I get to the end, I sometimes feel like the noise level is just horrible.
  • So, should I be more selective?
  • Am I using some redundant features of LR and thereby moving around more pixels than necessary to acheive the result I want?
  • If I plan to play with blacks, should I avoid playing with contrast too? If I plan to use the specific color sliders and TAT in the HSL panel, should I totally bypass the more general saturation slider at the beginning of the tool strip?
Am I thinking too much? :lol:
 
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Ml, that is funny!!
My guess too much thinking and looking at 1:1 views.
Do your prints or web images look too grainy??
Could be your camera!!:lol::lol::shock:

The tools are designed/positioned in the order they are for the most effective workflow. Notice that noise reduction and sharpening come after what you are talking about adjusting!;)
 
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Fill Light is a noise magnet. If you're going to avoid anything, that's the one! Certainly don't try to push it too far.

Playing with the blacks, you'll just end up clipping - so making some areas flat black with no detail - but you will suppress some of the noise in the process.
 
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Does using Fill Light produce more noise than using the Tone Curve to lighten the shadows and darks?
 
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I find that working down the Quick Develop panel gets me in the right area then fine tuning it in Develop module as a second pass. It sometimes helps to come back to an image a few times, can help in restore your own sense of perspective on how you think it looks after processing. Sometimes - I start from scratch as I see I went way off piste.

As I work with performance arts pics usually (music gigs, dance shows, theatre or stage lighting) there is usually a fair amount of detail that needs bringing out so I usually start with the Fill followed by Blacks, then Exposure, Brightness and Contrast. The order occasionally changes but as my exposure is generally OK I'm not tempted to adjust that first, just use it 'later on' to either bring it up or down a touch.

As Victoria says, he Fill is a noise magnet, which is also my experience, so I apply the same principle as with most adjustments, i.e. apply as much as you need, meaning to the point you notice noise or distortion, then pull back a tad. You may need to monitor other elements of your processing, just like adjusting an individual colour could clip or recover detail.
 
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Anything that push pixels from the far left of the histogram to the right is a noise maker. If you freshly imported image have most of its pixels in the left of the histogram, you are in a bad situation. This is why one should expose in such a way to have the pixels toward center or to the right without overexposing. You can always push toward left but the other way around... Beurk!
 
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So whether using fill light or tone curve, some noise will be the result, eh? This explains some of my issues. I had been underexposing because I know that blown highlights are nearly impossible to recover, so I figured I was safer underexposing. However, then I'm getting noise. So, the lesson for me is......learn to expose correctly in-camera!
 
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Denis has it right. Pushing darks into lights will always bring noise with those pixels. Think why those pixels are dark in the first place - not enough light has fallen on them and so those pixel values will naturally be noisy ("yoo kanna change de lawz of fizziks, capn!"). Pushing the fill or exposure just changes the values of the pixels but not the number of photons that originally fell on those pixels - so you change the values but the noise characteristics stay the same. Except, because you've made those pixels "brighter" you actually see the noise clearer (I'm assuming that fill and exposure changes are scalar changes rather than multiplicative - if the latter then you also make the noise worse!).
 
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Excellent explanation Antonio!
 
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The other point is that Fill Light acts on areas where there are shadow tones, while the Tone Curve affects the rendition of shadow tones anywhere in the image. So Fill Light will often mean that the noise shows in those darker areas, while a similar shadow brightness lift with the Tone Curve will also hit smaller darker areas (eg eye lashes) and may cause problems in those areas too.
 
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