When do you remove noise?

[Sinh Nhut Nguyen]

I sharpen the entire image first.


Remove noise in Noise Ninja.


Then use the brush tool to bring back the detail on the subject. I find using this tool a lot easier and faster than using the magic wand in CS 2 toselectively sharpen part of my image. I really don't need my background to be sharp.

[Madison]

Then you are, in fact, sharpening the noise, making it worse. (along with sharpening other details). You end up with a grainier image (albeit a bit sharper as well) and THEN you remove noise? This way you remove extra noise you created and you lose sharpness that you could have kept had you removed noise first, sharpened afterwards.





Just a well meant tip.

[Colin]

I just use DPP, so i don't have the ability to selectively sharpen or fiter, but that would be really cool. A reason to pay for some software.


I sharpen on the RAW tab to maximize image detail usually not past 2 or 3, but sometimes up to 5, but back off just before I get the single pixel crunch. I may sharpen in the RGB tab if I think it could use some sharpness pop. If the image has some noise I want to deal with, or I just want a little bit of general smoothing, I'll apply luma and chorma filtering in the third tab, as best addresses the issue, keeping an eye on the detail I just sharpened to see how much it softens it. If the softening is too much, I go back and forth either increasing the sharpening or decreasing the filtering, until I feel that I've got a good balance.


The way you guys talk, you make me want to pull my calibrated monitor out, buy Photoshop and/or other stuff, and take a class! OTOH, I'm lazy []

[Madison]

Slightly off topic, about local adjustments (sharpening/noise removal)


Lightroom can do local sharpening via the adjustment brush (which is still slow and tedious if you ask me). NIK Software makes a sharpening plugin (as well as a noise removal one) that has VERY clever ways of doing local adjustments via handles you place in the image. It works very intuitive after you just read the manual for a few minutes. I tried their demo and was amazed by the software and how much better it handles sharpening and noise removal than Photoshop's own algorhythms (or those of Lightroom).