How to Use Sharpening and Noise Reduction in Lightroom

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Photographers generally don’t agree on much. Sony, Nikon, or Canon? If you ask three different photographers, you’ll get three different answers. Color or black-and-white? Film or digital? The debates go on and on. But there’s one thing almost everyone can agree on, and that is that a good photo is a sharp photo. If there’s one immutable truth in the photography lexicon, that may be it. And, many of us will go through great lengths to get the sharpest photo, whether it was captured that way to begin with, or not.

The truth is, due to huge advances in autofocus technology, low-light performance, and optics, it’s pretty easy to capture a sharp image these days. Even when you do get a shot that you really like, but might be a bit on the soft side, all is not lost—by any means—and this is more true than ever in the newest versions of Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw.

Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan
Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan

But with great power comes great responsibility. As useful as the Adobe sharpening tools are, there is a fine line between using them in a way that improves the image and using them in a way that detracts from it. Something that helped me get better at using the sharpening tools in a tasteful way that helps my photo was to understand exactly what effect these tools have on the image.

As it turns out, “sharpening” does not really sharpen your photo at all, but rather gives the illusion of a sharper image by enhancing the definition of the edges in an image. The problem is, when you go overboard, in addition to enhancing the parts of the image that you want to highlight, you end up accentuating parts of the image that you don’t want to stand out—namely, noise. This relationship between sharpening and noise can be conveniently managed in the Detail panel in Lightroom or in Camera Raw.

Something worth mentioning is that the Detail panel controls will be most effective and least destructive to your images if you’re working with RAW files. JPEG files generally have sharpening applied to them to begin with and applying more on top of that is usually overkill. Plus, noise reduction just doesn’t work as well with compressed files.

Speaking of RAW files, when you import a RAW file into Lightroom, you’ll notice that the Detail panel will attempt to optimize the image’s sharpness and noise reduction settings for you based on its metadata. I find that about half the time, I don’t feel the need to make any additional adjustments to the sharpness or noise reduction settings. But, when an image is still softer than I would like it to be after import, and I do need to get into the nitty gritty, I’ve found I get the best results when I’m being really cognizant of what each control does independently to the image. A great way to see which parts of an image are being affected by a particular control in the Detail panel is by holding Alt/Option while you’re adjusting any of the sliders. When you do this, Lightroom highlights which parts of the image are being affected by each discrete control, giving you an easy way to see what’s going on in the image, as subtle or drastic as it may be. I wouldn’t recommend relying on this view when dialing-in your adjustments, but it’s a great way to see quickly which parts of an image are being affected, so you know to pay attention to those elements in the normal view.

When you’re making adjustments to the sharpening and noise reduction controls, it’s a good idea to set your zoom to a 1:1 ratio, so you are viewing the actual size of the image. Lightroom shows you the most accurate visual representation of what’s happening to the pixels with the zoom set at 1:1.

Detail Panel Controls

Here’s a breakdown of what each slider of the Detail panel does.

  1. Sharpening Amount: This control adds edge contrast to the image, making the bright parts of the edges brighter, and the dark parts darker, giving the illusion of a sharper image, even though no details are “recovered.” Often, this slider is all that you’ll need to adjust to get the effect you’re looking for.
  2. Sharpening Radius: This slider controls the thickness of the edges. Lower values yield a thinner edge, while larger values yield a thicker edge.
  3. Sharpening Detail: The Detail slider allows you to adjust the amount of sharpening applied to edges of various thicknesses within the image. Lower values restrict sharpening to only the larger edges, while higher values sharpen edges of all thicknesses. This is a slider you want to be careful with, because higher values can “bring the noise” out of an image, and often that’s not a good thing.
  4. Sharpening Masking: This tool is useful for limiting excessive noise added to an image by the other sharpening controls. As you drag the slider to the right, you limit the sharpening effect to only the strongest edges.
  5. Noise Reduction Luminance: This control decreases the variance in luminance between pixels, which has the effect of reducing noise, but at the expense of losing detail.
  6. Noise Reduction Luminance Detail: This control attempts to regain fine contrast lost as a byproduct of the Luminance control.
  7. Noise Reduction Luminance Contrast: This control tries to recover contrast in larger groups of pixels versus the Detail slider. Larger shapes in your image will become more defined as you move this slider to the right.
  8. Noise Reduction Color: This control attempts to reduce color noise by smoothing out drastic differences in color from pixel to pixel. It’s especially useful for images captured at high ISO settings. Too much of this effect, however, can dull the image, so you need to be careful.
  9. Noise Reduction Color Detail: This control tries to recover the color variance between pixels that may have been lost due to the color noise reduction.
  10. Noise Reduction Color Smoothness: This slider aims to smooth out blotchy parts of an image by smoothing out the difference in color versus surrounding areas.

Conclusion

If you want to make your images as impactful as possible, having a clear understanding of each of the controls in the Detail panel is crucial. If you have any questions or comments at all, I encourage you to leave them in the designated section, below.

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