How to select and remove noise in LR 3? (1 Viewer)

Hi,
I'm totally new to photoshop and trying to work on my first RAW file in LR 3. How do I select the parts of the image that I you do not want to remove noise from?spend hours reading everything on every forum but could not find any Info. I can't believe that they put all the work into the new LR3 without having these basic tools... so I'm guessing I'm missing something... any help will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
Dubi

Are you using Lightroom or Photoshop as you mention both in your post?

If you are using just Lightroom then I'm afraid you are restricted to using Adobe Camera Raw to apply global changes your image. If you want to use masks to apply changes to selective parts of an image then you will have to use Photoshop.

Thanks Mono! I'm using both LR and Photoshop.
I'm amazed that LR do not have local adjustments with Noise and Sharpening,its so basic! so how do most users reduce noise in LR without losing detail in the subject?

dubi said:

how do most users reduce noise in LR without losing detail in the subject?

Click to expand...

By using the 'Details' slider to adapt the noise reduction.

Attached are three 100% crops from a single image, the first has no noise reduction at all (and it's at ISO800) the second has both Luminance and Colour reduction settings at 100 (out of 100) with both detail setings at zero. The third has 100 noise reduction as well, but the Luminance detail is set to 70.

I hope you agree that, even with NR turned up way further than I'd normally use it, there's minimal loss of detail in the third image. NR in Lightroom 3 is very good indeed, I can see that Noise Ninja is going to accumulating a few digital cobwebs in the future.

Impressive! you were really able to bring back the detail.
So far I'm very impressed--image quality is quite good. I have tried these setting on several files and got much better results than what I have done so far.
Thanks Frank!

dubi said:

I'm amazed that LR do not have local adjustments with Noise and Sharpening,its so basic!

Click to expand...

You can make local adjustments to Sharpness, saturation, exposure etc. in LR using the adjustment brush in the Develop module.

I'm amazed that few others seem to mention (or possibly know) this! It's so basic!

Kevin