Lightroom 4 noise reduction (1 Viewer)

I thought I'd write some tips I've just made up for noise reduction with bird photos.

The problem with bird photos is we need high detail on the bird feathers (so no NR), but often need to reduce noise in the background. So, we need to apply NR selectively. For the last couple of days I've been playing around with layers in Photoshop Elements and also in Remask. My limited skills gave me good results, but it was a painful process. So, I went back to look at Lightroom and within a couple of minutes got superior results. Not as good perhaps as others might get using better tools, but really good anyway.

The steps are simple.

1) Apply strong NR in Lightroom, with detail kept low, so the background looks how you want. I did luminance 69, detail 21 since totally removing all noise was less natural in this pic (7D, 70-300L @300mm, ISO 1600).
2) Brush over the whole of the bird, overflowing into the background a little, with a hard brush (no feather) set to -100 Noise, perhaps with a bit of sharpening and clarity if you like. I didn't here. Auto-mask should be off
3) zoom in, switch to the eraser brush with a small feather and turn Auto Mask on. Paint round the outside of the bird to remove the overflow. The program should paint round any fine feathers, rather than on them.

Depending on the edge, it may work better to do the edge from within the bird or from the outside. Within less time than it took me to write this, you can end up with very good results.

Any improvements to this are gratefully accepted.

100% crops
Original photo


Global NR. Note the lost detail. (I know I could have dialled back the NR, but then the background would have been noisy still.)


Local NR, as described.

Here's my second go. Actually took a bit longer, about 8 minutes, as the Auto Mask was a bit confused bewteen the bird and background near the bottom.

The fluffy hair was more problematic too, but with my skillset it would take me a long, long time to get better results through fiddling with layers. And it's conveniently all in one program.

Not checked, but will this work in the LR 3 as well as it looks very good from what I see with your photo.

punta said:

Not checked, but will this work in the LR 3 as well as it looks very good from what I see with your photo.

Click to expand...

I'm afraid not, the ability to use brushes for noise reduction is new in LR4. Actually, the improvements to NR in general were my main reason for upgrading.