Category Archives: Adobe Camera RAW

Photoshop Alternatives: On1 RAW 2019 (+Affinity and Gimp)

Adobe long ago reduced their price for the Photoshop/Lightroom bundle to $10/month but for years now no longer has a way to purchase and outright own Photoshop. The latest version of Photoshop (Photoshop CC, aka Photoshop CC 2019)… it’s a rent-for-life or get-out-of-Dodge model. The optics of the rental model are anathema for many people. We at StarCircleAcademy took a look at various alternatives to Photoshop in case you aren’t willing to engage the “rent for life” strategy. However we will also tell you that Photoshop is the 600 pound Gorilla. You really can not argue with its features (bloated as they are) or price ($120/year), or abundance of resources on how to use, abuse, and creatively curse at Photoshop as a tool.

The contenders are: Gimp (free, multi-platform), On1 Perfect Photo Suite (now called RAW 2019), and Affinity. We will start with On1.

ON1 Photo RAW 2019.2

The pricing as of May, 2019 is $80 for the complete software (discounted from $100 – as is often the case). Upgrade cost is listed as $80. That price brings it under the cost of upgrading to or purchasing Photoshop CS6 (although it’s not clear you can do that anymore), and because On1 is a perpetual license, the three-year cost of ownership is $260 (one purchase, two annual upgrades) versus the best possible three year cost for Adobe Photographers subscription bundle of $360. And much better than purchasing Photoshop CS6. But there is one wrinkle. How many copies you are allowed to use is a murky area that is not spelled out clearly on their site. Their site says “When you purchase ON1 Photo RAW 2019.2 you receive a perpetual license“. At times ON1 has allowed 5 seats, the fact that its not spelled out on their site implies the number of seats is subject to change. I am also not clear how they enforce the number of installs allowed. If you have more than one computer or frequently upgrade computers, you may exhaust the number of installs. For the purpose of this discussion, our review was of 2019.1.

On1 is available for windows or Mac operating systems.

Installation

We didn’t get off to a good start. The trial version was a 1GB download. Installation proceeded slowly, and it required shutdown of Photoshop CC. Fair enough since On1 includes plugins for various Photoshop components. For this test we installed on an aging 4 core 8Gb RAM Lenovo laptop machine with Windows 10, 64-bit. When we started the install, we were warned to close Photoshop.

After dismissing Photoshop it ran a while (3 min 45 seconds) to install. Years ago when we installed an older version (7.5 Perfect Suite) we got a warning about incompatible display cards near the end of the long install, but that was on older hardware. Photoshop never warned us like that.

Usage

We quickly fired up On1, and after dismissing the modal (i.e. in-your-face) getting started box, we “Browsed” to a folder containing our recent work. The folder was previously browsed with Adobe Bridge and loaded VERY fast, the entire directory came up with the images and the ratings that were previously applied. This is MUCH, MUCH faster and more efficient than Lightroom, and even faster than Adobe Bridge (which doesn’t require importing either).

Unfortunately we made the mistake of “enlarging” to full screen and then could NOT find how to make the window smaller again. We tried “Escape”, looking in the various toolbars… No joy. So we killed the program with Alt-F4 and restarted. On1 came up in the same place we had left off, but MAXIMIZED again with no controls to minimize. After hunting in “View -> Maximize” (which made no sense!) we were able to restore the window to add the minimize/maximize window options on the title bar and then drag to downsize the window. Searching in the online help for “undo maximize” or even “maximize” didn’t find anything, by the way.

Our primary display has text size set to 200% so that we can easily capture readable screenshots as well as assuage our tired old eyes. However on our display at some point On1 Tools became garbled.

Next we tried loading a previously created .psd document. This was quite frustrating. The document was created in maximum compatibility mode and has layer groups and layers, but it renders in On1 as a single layer. What is worse, is that I couldn’t FIND the Layers window. I navigated to Windows -> Layers (Ctl+2) and NOTHING happened. This was frustrating also, but it appears the reason that nothing happened is that the Layers palette is part of the “Develop” panel. If you are looking at e.g. “Lens Correction”, then unfortunately “Layers” is not visible because you have to scroll up. The same problem occurs if you are in the browse setting and click the “Layers” option at the right. The edit comes up, but it doesn’t show the Layers!

To see if we could make On1 show our layers, we thought our normal workflow of using Colorspace: ProPhoto RGB, at 16 bits may explain why the layered photo was coming up as a single layer in On1. We went back into Photoshop CC 2019, removed layer groups (in case that was confusing On1), converted to SRGB profile, 8-bit mode, merged several layers then resaved the document. The saving file almost immediately appeared in the On1 browse menu, but the image shown was flashing between gray dots and an image. It was a big image (800Mb), and it took Photoshop quite a while to write it to our Dropbox drive. Apparently that also confused On1 a bit. And we notice that On1 does have an option to work in 16 bit ProPhoto RGB by default. That’s excellent.

Previously with the On1 Suite 7, we ran into this problem

Our choices seem pretty limited. Indeed, when clicking OK what we got was a big all-white canvas.

While On1 does provide layering, it doesn’t seem to work with layers in Photoshop psb or psd documents. That is a serious shortcoming if you, like we, have a ton of .psd documents you want to work with.

Usability Quirks

There are quirks with the interface that bother us. For example, the various palettes do not appear to be movable – and that caused our problem finding the layer palette, described earlier. It also appears that On1 spent more effort “mimicking” the Lightroom layouts and contents, but the “Presets” window wastes a lot of space. Presets never struck us as a worthwhile way to improve photos, by the way. Unfortunately the tiny border you need to discover to close Presets (or re-open them) is a bad design choice. We have no clue why they don’t have a “show presets” control (or why you can hide layers).

Some operations are pretty easy to figure out, but it is not at all obvious to us how you mix masking with effects and layers. On1 has a “Perfect mask” setting that is clever and beats the pants off of anything Photoshop currently offers in ease of use and net result. When masking near the boundary of sky and tree the perfect mask setting figures out that you want to operate on either the sky or the tree, not both. And On1 also has a Mask Bug which is an odd looking thing (and very odd name) that is quite functional. It is a highly adjustable gradient mask with drag controls to control density, directionality, feathering and the area to be adjusted. What is not immediately obvious, however, is how you can use a bug mask with a separate adjustment – for example to remove the affect of the bug in one area or increase it in another. Ultimately the Perfect Brush is nice, but we do miss the magic wand selection that Photoshop offers.

Layers are also non-intuitive – for example there is a “Local” option after selecting a layer. This appears to mean “operate on the mask”, but the word “Local” doesn’t make sense to us.

Our work often consists of opening multiple documents as layers. What On1 didn’t do is provide a simple interface for this. That is, you CAN use Browse to open documents as layers, but if you’re already in edit mode for a document and try to use the filmstrip mode to Browse for additional layers you don’t have the open/add as layer option. We hoped to be able to select multiple images and then add them as layers to our existing document. Instead, what we have to do is open one document, then use the + to find and open the additional images as layers from the layer palette. That’s tedious. We also made the mistake of accidentally hitting merge layers (just left of the option for blending control) and watched as On1 merged layers with no confirmation and no undo! Yuck.

Not only does On1 seem to be sluggish loading multiple documents as layers, but you can not change blending options for multiple layers at once. You have to operate on each layer one-at-a-time (select layer, click options, change blend mode). That is tedious.

Another unexpected quirk: we double clicked the .onphoto file that was created by layering two documents. Instead of opening directly into edit mode, it just opened browse mode. And even more curiously, there is no “save as” and no document rename in the edit mode. It looks like On1 also created a .on1 document, but did not register this with windows, so windows didn’t know how to open it. After associating the .on1 file with On1, it STILL wouldn’t open in develop mode. The problem with the lack of rename is that it’s now not possible to use one base document as a foreground with different additional layers. On1 will only save the layers in association with the “base” document (_W9A3041 in the example shown).

Star Trails and Automation

It appears that On1 does not have any kind of automation that would allow easy creation of star trails in the way that the Advanced Stacker Plus can interact with Photoshop. And as we already noted, the Layer manipulations available in On1 require lots of manual intervention just like it used to be in Photoshop (CS5 and earlier). After Photoshop CS6 the interface allowed multiple layer selection and global blending mode changes.

By way of reminder, Advanced Stacker Plus processes incoming documents a layer at a time. This method of processing keeps the memory footprint low and greatly speeds up operation of Photoshop when loading more than 20-30 images as layers.

In Conclusion

We found some things to like about On1 – it’s perpetual license, some good masking tools, but we found it falls short of the editing experience we wish to have and therefore do not recommend it.

In the next articles we will address Affinity Photo (short answer: it seems to be quite powerful), and GIMP.

Exploring Night Photography Lesson 5: Photo Processing

What settings?

Last week’s assignment was:

Weather Permitting, get at least 20 minutes worth of star trails. First determine what the best starting exposure is, then take 20 minutes worth.

I chose to take about 270, 15-second exposures at f/4, ISO 800 for my star trails using an intervalometer trick that I demonstrated in class. That nets over an hours worth of exposures. But how did I come up with those settings? It was a little bit experience, and a little bit application of the principle taught in the very first homework: namely try and see! But how did I decide what evening I would try to get star trails? The weather needed to be right, so the germaine question is:

When will the weather be right for star trails?

Well, we strongly recommend weather.gov. See our article about how to use the information. Indeed, we like it so much, we even created a page with forecasts for places we often find ourselves going.

Weather, check. Settings, check. Now what?

Wait, what about the moon? We need to know when it rises and sets. A full moon washes out a lot of the night sky and makes for unpleasant star trails. There are many places to determine what the moon situation is like, but I like to use The Photographer’s Ephemeris (either the App, or the online version).

Next we need to review the Stacker’s Checklist both to be sure we have all the gear and that we know what we are doing. Best is to run through it at home. Is it surprising that there are SO MANY steps? Sorry, but they are there to prevent you from making all the mistakes we’ve made.

In class we reviewed our homework (star trails) from the last assignment and discussed hits and misses. Finally we got to the meat:

Photo Processing

It would be foolish to attempt to describe everything we did in class… especially since we have so many articles here describing how to photo process your shots (and webinars and recordings, too – oh my!)

But we demonstrated three things:

Super simple Panorama creation using “Image Composite Editor” from Microsoft. Yep. You have to have a Windows machine to use it… but it’s free and SUPER simple and more effective than anything we’ve managed to get out of Photoshop or Lightroom.
What Lightroom is good for… cataloging your images. And what it’s NOT good for: complex multi-image editing – for example star trails and image combinations.
The three most powerful and useful elements of Photoshop:
1. Layers – This is the real meat of Photoshop together with blend modes which mathematically combine layers.
2. Masks – Masks allow you to change the way layers and adjustments get combined by “masking” out some of the changes.
3. Adjustments: Curves – Curves are the best tool to learn since nearly everything you can do with the other tools can be done with curves… and if you get the hang of it, curves are actually easier to understand.

We also demonstrated Adobe Bridge which is a “lighter weight” version of Lightroom – one that doesn’t require any importing. And we spilled the beans that “Adobe Camera Raw” is the guts of Lightroom. And that Lightroom adjustments are really just like what you can do in Photoshop… with some of the magic, and much of the versatility – and also much of the complexity removed.

We also explained why RAW is the way to go, and why RAW is ugly (short reason: the camera does not see the way we do it just records heaps of numbers).

We did not do this in class, but we covered much of the ground:

12 Minute Star Trail using Advanced Stacker PLUS version14D from Steven Christenson on Vimeo.

Homework Assignment

Fire up Photoshop and try to duplicate this image:

Final image with replaced foreground

Super big hint… all the files you need and the process to accomplish the task is described in this article: Foreground-o-Matic.

Use the same technique on your own image(s) to pick a more interesting foreground image from a “stack” (sequence) of images.

Feel free to comment below if you know the answers to the questions we asked in the first image above. We will reveal the answers in the next article.

The 5 Most Used Photo Enhancement Techniques – Part 2

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You are back! Good. In the last article we talked about White Balance and Noise Reduction. As two of the five most useful tools in the arsenal of the night photographer.

In this article we will tackle two of the remaining items:

Exposure and Contrast enhancement
Sharpening (and de-sharpening)

Healing and cloning will be in Part 3.

While we have seem some fascinating composite and highly edited images our goal is usually to make a compelling photo. But we do like realism, too. So while we will show techniques that can be pushed to extremes to make gaudy Milky Ways, or super saturated star trails, we personally do not go there often.

Exposure and Contrast Enhancement

Below is the result we want to achieve.

Single Exposure with exposure and contrast adjustments, healing, cloning, selective blurring and sharpening.

But we will be starting with a single daylight exposure from the Outer Banks, North Carolina. When we shot the scene we shot a bracketed exposure at one-stop intervals. Before we look at the exposures, let’s look at the histograms from each of the three exposures

Which one is the best image to start with to make our adjustments? Hint, it’s the one at the right. The +1 exposure has no loss of detail because nothing has been over exposed. Here is the exposure.

+1 Exposure

The scene seems flat and lifeless – almost nothing like it looked to the eye, and not close to what we hope it will be. Part of the reason it looks so flat is that we have not done any adjustments to the original RAW file. If you shoot JPGs the curves and saturation adjustments are automatically applied so you might conclude that RAW images are a waste of time. That would be wrong. The truth is there is much room for improvement in the RAW images and much of the “good stuff” is lost when the camera applies the conversion to JPEG.

All of the histograms show decently exposed images. But it looks like even in the +1 image we still have some room left. That is, we could have exposed a bit more to get the whites all the way to the right. All of our histograms show that we have no black (nothing at the left edge), and no white (content at the right edge). An underexposed image might have richer color but it will suffer when we boost the exposure and contrast. The lighter exposure will suffer much less degradation. In fact, the act of reducing exposure deepens the saturation – we do not have to play with the saturation sliders at all! Pleasing saturation shifts from adjusting exposure are one of the many good reasons why exposing to the right (ETTR) is an effective strategy.

Adjusting Exposure and Contrast – Lightroom Auto

There are many ways to adjust contrast and surprisingly the “Contrast” slider is not usually the most effective way. Using contrast alone often makes the lights too light and the darks too dark. One thing you can try is to use the “Auto” button. It sometimes works. In fact, for these images, it works pretty well with the +1 exposure, but not as well with the normal exposure.

The “Auto” feature of Lightroom under Basic settings

Here is what Auto did for this image:

Lightroom Auto Adjustment

The histogram has been stretched and the image looks pretty good. Note that we’ve turned on the clipping indicators by clicking where the white arrows point. After Auto we found a few small spots where black level clipping has occurred as indicated by blue blobs which are circled in red above. No big deal. You can also see what Basic adjustments Lightroom made – exposure has been reduced by one stop, contrast +20, whites +62, blacks -50. We now have an idea what the Basic adjustments can do. Auto almost never creates a good result when working with dark or night images.

Adjusting Exposure and Contrast – Lightroom Tone Curve

There is another way, and in our opinion, a more powerful way to adjust the exposure and contrast and that is using the Tone Curve. One reason we prefer this method is that it has an almost exact analog in Photoshop (Curves), as well as an almost identical behavior if using Adobe Camera RAW.

Lightroom Tone Curve

What we want to do is to darken the shadows and midtones and slightly lighten the bright areas without losing information – that is to adjust the exposure and contrast. The process is called “stretching the histogram”. It’s pretty straight forward. Click points on the curve and drag up or down and left or right to create a new curve while paying attention to both the image and the resulting histogram.

Before and After Tone Curve Adjustment

Can you make these adjustments using Adobe Camera RAW? Yes! The controls are nearly identical.

This is now a good starting point to apply some additional pop, But what if you wanted to do this in Photoshop?

Photoshop Exposure and Contrast using Curves Adjustment Layer

Histogram Stretch using Photoshop

The image above has brought out a bit of pink in the sky, but the dune is a little flat and a little dark. The good news is there is a way to give specific colors special attention – using what we call the “twiddle finger”. You click the hand icon, then pick an area of the image you would like to brighten or darken. The luminosity selected is shown on the graph, then you drag the mouse up or down.

Before Twiddle Hand curve adjustment

After twiddling upward a bit

The twiddling can be repeated. Beware, though, twiddling is global, not local. In general the tone curve should always be flat or upward as you move left to right otherwise you will be lightening dark areas to the point where they become lighter than adjacent light areas. One way to improve your curve is to smooth the graph. Click the pencil icon then the icon below it (graph adjust), then click the graph (above the pencil).

After a bit more fiddling and twiddling we get what you see below. What more fiddling? Well, we like to add another adjustment curve and select the “Increased Contrast” option. If things were close to good to start with, the curve might go too far, so adjusting the layer opacity downward is the solution. In fact, we use the “Adjust contrast curve” so often that we created an action for it and assigned it its own hot key (F9).

Original Exposure Contrast Enhanced, Histogram Stretched, fully twiddled 🙂

Now we have quite a bit more drama, and much more contrast. Where are the distractions? What leads your eye away from the interesting parts of the scene? What are the interesting parts of the scene? Now is a good time to make note of the distractions, because soon we will conquer those.

In truth, we have one more thing to address in the exposure category. The sky is a bit too bright. The solution is to apply a gradient using either Adobe Camera RAW or Lightroom (it can be done in Photoshop but it is harder than it should be, and less convenient).

Graduated Skies – Lightroom

The graduated filter (M) is our friend for not only darkening the sky, but also making other adjustments. That you can make multiple adjustments simultaneously is one thing that sets it apart from the Photoshop methods. Here we have zoomed to 100% to show both a portion of the sky and the location of the graduated filter tool. Note that the sky is a bit “gritty”. We will fix that!

Graduated Filter tool and gritty sky at 100%

Our sky fix will illustrate one of our other techniques: selective sharpening – only in this case we will de-sharpen to remove the “grit” as follows.

Applying a Gradient to the Sky

We use a sky gradient so often that we created a pre-set for it. The preset reduces exposure by -0.76, contrast by -17, saturation by -24, sharpness by -40, and noise by +100. Those last two, decreasing sharpness and increasing noise processing result intentionally in blurring. In this case the exposure correction is a bit too strong, but that is easy to fix by bumping the exposure up a little (-0.51).

Let’s look at what this gradient did to our sky. Notice how the grit is just about gone.

If you are thinking that applying a gradient to darken the sky is somehow dishonest, then please don’t use a graduated neutral density filter (GND) which does the same thing at image capture time – but a physical GND does so less elegantly!

Sharpening and Desharpening

We snuck in a trick to desharpen a mottled/gritty sky above, so please read that for one direction. In fact, we find that using noise reduction is often the most effective way to soften because the result – if not pushed to an extreme – is often more satisfying than using any other method. But some things need a little sharpening, like the eyes and hair of people, the boundaries between objects in a landscape. When we want to do sharpening we never (ok, almost never) do global sharpening. One reason we do not globally sharpen is it tends to make mottle things more mottled – like the gritty sky we showed earlier. It seldom makes sense to sharpen clouds or things that are not sharp by their nature.

Indeed in our beach scene there is really nothing that demands sharpening, but all the same, we’ll apply a little bit at the sky/ground border – mostly to help the sea oats stand out a little more. It’s tempting to think that the Lightroom adjustment brush “sharpen” tool is the right one to use here, but often sharpen alone is not as effective. When sharpening is overused it creates odd artifacts. Often the more effective way to sharpen is to use a bit of “clarity” as well as sharpening. Clarity is a local contrast adjustment which has no analog in Photoshop. If you want to use clarity in Photoshop you must bounce over into Adobe Camera RAW. In Photoshop CC you can get a layer into ACR using the Filter -> Camera Raw Filter dialog. Lightroom and ACR are very similar, so lets show ACR here.

Adjustment Brush in Adobe Camera RAW

After setting all the adjustments to zero (easy in Lightroom, just double click on each item), we set the Clarity up (+15), and the Sharpness up (+6). Adjust the size, feathering, density and flow of the brush and paint along the horizon and through the grasses. It’s always better to go a little at a time than to try to go all at once. When done hit apply or Open.

In Photoshop we often take a completely different approach. Instead we duplicate the layer, label it “Sharpened” then sharpen (using the smart sharpen filter) or noise reduce the entire layer and then mask it all off. We then “paint back in” the areas we want a correction applied to using a white brush on the mask.

Wow. We’ve spent quite a lot of time talking about exposure enhancements and sharpening and desharpening, so spot removal (cloning, healing and cropping) will appear in part 3.

The 5 Most Used Photo Enhancement Techniques

White Balance

We hate to be the first to break the news, but your camera is pretty clueless about what color white is. The camera will take its best guess. Our experience with night photography is that the camera choice is usually wrong – or at least unappealing. At its core white balance requires adjusting the red, green, and blue colors so that an area that should have a neutral gray or white color is actually gray – not tinged red, blue or green. When shooting at night, understand that every light in the scene – including stars – has a different color bias (tint). Sodium vapor lights for example are horrendous. Sodium vapor lights used in many streetlights are predominately yellow-brown and almost monochromatic. Under sodium vapor lights it will be impossible to achieve a natural color spectrum. You may want to adjust different parts of a night image separately. You may have to compromise and have a scene that has a bias of a pleasing kind rather than the ugly variety.

Correcting White Balance

The easiest way to make the adjustment in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw is with the White Balance tool. It looks like an eye dropper. You click the tool, then click a gray area of the photo – if there is something that should be gray in the photo, that is. Even a white area is fine (but not an overexposed white). Stars are generally not good choices for gray-scale selection both because they are often over exposed and because many of them are NOT white! In the example below you see a photo of the Ocracoke Lighthouse which is definitely white, not the orange that resulted from sodium vapor lights.

The White Balance tool in Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Camera Raw White Balance Tool

The dubious result of getting the lighthouse to its proper color via the white balance tool appears below. The sky and stars are unnaturally and artificially blue. There are several solutions to this problem: color correct the lighthouse separately or compromise by warming (increasing the temperature) of the selected balance. Or try again by clicking elsewhere!

By selecting a different location for the gray sample tool a better compromise can be achieved as shown in the photo below. An examination of the scene reveals that the lighthouse is directly lit while the shed (near the bottom of the shot) is not. The shed and other areas in shadow are lit by ambient light reflected from many sources – including sky glow. After selecting the shadow area the remaining white imbalance of the lighthouse can be handled by desaturating using the local adjustment brush – or leave it like it is.

White Balance Correction in Photoshop

The same eyedropper style adjustment can be found in Photoshop, but you’ll have to hunt for it because the “Color Balance” Adjustment is not where you’ll find it!

White Balance (gray point) selector of Curves in Photoshop. The gray point selector is also in the Levels adjustment.

Note that in Photoshop you have two ways to go: use an adjustment layer, or use an Image -> Adjustments -> Curves (or Levels). We recommend using an Adjustment Layer because you can paint on the mask to control the effect and that makes it easy to adjust different parts of the image separately. To adjust areas separately in Lightroom, use the Local Correction brush and adjust the white balance slider.

Selective Color Balance Correction

Consider the following photo. With the new flight rules, you can use your camera while the plane is taking off or landing. Here the plane is landing at San Jose International Airport. There are two things about it that are good candidates for fixing. The first is the distracting glare of reflection from light inside the airplane (that’s due to Virgin America’s “Purple Ambiance”). We’d like to get rid of the distraction and it’s clear we will not be able to simply crop it out without giving up some of the interesting details.

Glare from internal reflections leaves a blue cast. There is also noise in this one second, ISO 1600 exposure.

The second thing that is noticeable in the 100% (Zoomed view) is the colorful noise in the dark (and light) areas of the photo. No sky has grit in it – at least not like that!

100% View of the noise near the wing.

We can tackle both problems separately or at once. Selectively desaturating, and slightly darkening the blue glare is simple in Lightroom. Select the adjustment brush (it looks like a face powder brush right below the “Histogram”), dial down the saturation, and slightly dial back the exposure. Then paint on the image where we want the change to occur. It may be useful to adjust the brush size, density and feathering. Here some feathering is important. We will not try to also increase the noise processing here, because the whole image needs some despeckling.

Below the mask shows where we painted – and not particularly carefully, either! The Saturation was turned down to -69, and the exposure by almost a full stop. In a brighter sky we might not have been able to darken the touched up area as aggressively.

Attacking the Glare with Local Adjustments in Lightroom

The next thing we want to address is the noise. It’s everywhere in this photo. As we will learn in the next article, we often use noise reduction for smoothing things like blue (or dark) skies and in shadows where you would not expect to find details. Using Adobe Camera Raw for saturation, exposure and noise reduction works the same way as in Lightroom it’s just that the adjustment brush is shaped differently and found in a different place.

The adjustment brush in Adobe Camera Raw

Out Darn Noise

In Lightroom (and Adobe Camera Raw), there are two simple – and effective ways – to reduce noise in photos. One is to selectively reduce noise using the “Noise” slider of the adjustment brush as we saw with our selective saturation adjustment. Moving the Noise slider to the right increases the amount of noise reduction but does not give you control over what KIND of noise reduction is performed. ACR and Lightroom have specific controls to reduce Luminance noise (dark and light speckles) and Color or Chroma noise (colored speckles). The noise reduction slider with the Local Correction brush does not let you control which type of noise reduction is applied. Sometimes correcting only the luminance noise is the best approach. Both methods of correcting noise result in some blurring of the photo. How much blurring depends on how severely the sliders are adjusted. There is no formula for getting noise reduction to work well except to be careful not to over do it! Surprisingly, a little bit of noise makes a better photo. Indeed, there is an option to ADD noise in the “Effects” panel (called Grain). One thing to beware of: using the color noise reduction aggressively will result in loss of star colors in your night sky. In the examples below we’ve brightened the image to make the changes easier to see.

Before any Adjustment, Turning off the default sharpness enhancement.

The noise reduction portion of Lightroom is found in the Details section. Any controls used in this section will apply to the entire image – which is one reason adjustments should be made carefully and deliberately. The first step we usually take is to eliminate the default sharpening that Lightroom wants to apply. We would rather selectively sharpen what needs sharpening than doing indiscriminate global sharpening. Next zoom in to 1:1 view of an area (Z key) where noise reduction is needed. For this pick a dark area where some details should be observable. It is also helpful to pick a dark area adjacent to a lighter area where sharpness is desired so the effect of noise reduction can be seen on two elements at once.

We slowly bump up the luminance until we see less “grit”. Be sure to wait long enough to see the changes made in the image. We do not generally notice much difference with the detail and contrast sliders, but if we find ourselves adjusting as far as halfway on luminance and not getting what we want, we play with those sub-sliders.

If we still have not achieved the correction we want, we bump the color slider as well… only much more carefully. If there is a LOT of color noise the color noise correction may be the slider to bump first. Once things are “almost” where we think they look right we choose another area to take a look. It is important to select an area of the photo that did not need much adjustment – usually a bright area. If the brighter area has become too blurred, we back off on the overall adjustment and then use a local adjustment to add still more noise reduction selectively.

All adjustments made - note that perfect smoothness is not a goal.

All adjustments made – note that perfect smoothness is not the goal!

In Photoshop there are many more ways to reduce noise than those provided in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. Our experience is that the noise controls in ACR and Lightroom are very good – better than any specific filters you will find in Photoshop. We do use Topaz Lab’s DeNoise photoshop plugin quite a lot however. The best noise reduction method – when possible is to use the Simple Astrophotography Processing Technique. A photo like the one shown here is not a candidate, however, because that Astro technique requires multiple frames of the same image – that wasn’t possible here with the aircraft coming in for its bumpy landing.

Finished Image

In the next article we will take on the remaining subjects, but you may have already figured out one of the techniques we use for desharpening – aggressive noise reduction!

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