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Camera RAW: Noise Reduction & Lens Correction

So we were talking about camera. There are some things in raw. It's selected cover that we haven't had a chance to yet. Um, let me just see if I can find a few examples. One of the things is any time you end up brightening up a dark image, you come in and you remember this image when I first opened it. What if you remember what it looked like, I'll bring us back to the original like that. Any time you do this kind of stuff where you pull out a tremendous amount of shadow detail, you're gonna need to do some additional adjustment. So let me undo that in Another thing I should comment on is, during the break, we looked a little bit into what the monitors look like. My monitor versus what your feet is looking like. And it sounds like my monitor is darker than your feed. So if it looks as if I over brighten things, that's because I can't see exactly what you're seeing. I'm seeing a version on my screen that's darker. So I'm doing until my I thinks it looks OK and it sounds like in the feed...

that might be a bit brighter than normal. Like usually this one. I don't think I have to crank the shadows all the way. So just here where? So anyway, any time you do something where you bring shadows up a tremendous amount, you're going to need to think about noise reduction. Because what happens is as you get into the darker and darker areas of your image, it becomes more difficult for your camera to capture detail. And as it starts laboring, getting that detail, it ends up introducing noise into it in the noise is in your picture to begin with, bringing up things like the shadows. Slider does not introduce noise. It just makes it easier to see the noise that was already there. It was just so dark that you're I couldn't see the detail of it. So if I zoom up on this image, I'm guessing that we're going to see some noise. So this is 100% view. If you want to get to 100% view very quickly, you can double click on the zoom tool, so double click zoom tool for 100% view. You double click the hand tool to zoom out to fit in window. So those are two things that I do quite frequently, but let's seem like to maybe 200% make it a little easier to see. And this is something that's sometimes difficult to teach remotely, because any time you watch video, it compresses the video quite a bit, and it's hard to see the really, really fine details. So I'm not sure how great you be able to see this noise. If I zoom up Ah lot, it should become more obvious because your compression won't mess with it. Um, but there's a lot of noise here. I also see another issue, and that is when I look at the edges of things, I can see this kind of greenish stuff in here in kind of magenta e stuff that doesn't look like it would really be there if I was standing the scene. Can you guys see that just a little bit? Yeah, it has to do with the lens, and that's another thing I might feel a little bit hard to see in the video. So if I have ever brought shadows up really high, one of the other things, I'll have to do is I'm gonna come over here to these other tabs on I'm gonna click on the tab. It looks like two triangles. That's the detail tab, and I'm going to need to do two things. The first thing I'm going to need to do is make sure that sharpening is not hurting me. What it condo's is if sharpening is being applied where there is no real detail, then what is really going to be Scharping is the noise in. So oftentimes it'll be the skies were If they end up looking noisy, it's oftentimes because Scharping is being applied there and there's no real detail there. There's no clouds, is not a bird up there or something else that has any fine detail. So here's the first thing I would do. If I have a noisy image, I'm in the tab that's got the two triangles. It's called the detail tab, and under sharpening, I'm not necessarily going to change the amount of sharpening, although I might decide to later. But there's a slider called masking in masking. Has he hidden feature built into it, where, in order to get a special view of your image you can hold on the option key, Alton Windows. I'm holding it down right now. Then, with that key held down, I'm gonna click on the masking slider and just hold the mouse button down. What I'm seeing right now is it showing me exactly where it's gonna sharpen the image. Any area that is white will be sharpened, so this means it would sharpen everything, all right. And then if I start to bring this up, you'll see shades of gray appear, and eventually you'll see black appear black means no sharpening would be applied at all. A shade of gray would mean partial sharpening. So what I can do here is if I have a noisy image, I'm gonna hold down the option key. When I grab masking, I'm gonna bring it up until whatever areas contain no useful detail, like a blue sky or, well, look at a few other images later on, or maybe we'll see it. But just where if you looked at it, there's no enough no useful diesel. There's no texture in that area. It's just smooth. Then I want to bring this up until those areas turned black. That's just gonna make sure that sharpening is not being applied there where it's not needed. Otherwise, it's just gonna exaggerate the noise. All right, then. The other thing that I can do is to try to minimize the noise. We have aluminum slider under noise reduction, and I could bring that up because default zero. It's not trying at all to do that, and I'm gonna bring it up until that noise is no longer bothering me. Depends on the image and how huge of an adjustment you've applied. Also, how old of a camera you have older? The cameras are much noisier than new ones. If I turn preview off, we'll see before and after takes a while for update here. I'll zoom up a little bit because on the video, it might be hard to see before it hasn't. There goes before, after you need to be doing some sort of noise reduction. If you end up bringing up that shadows, slaughter really, really far and you get a tremendous amount of shadows. That means you're gonna be noisy in that area, and so you need to do that Now. I know there's a lot of other settings in here and If we have time later on, we'll get into those. But I don't want to complicate the idea of just make sure it's not sharpening it and then try to get rid of it. And then later on, we'll possibly get into some more detail on what the additional sliders. So all of these images that I worked with where they were under exposed, that's something I would want Teoh consider other things that can bug me. Not sure if this image will have it or not. But we'll find out pretty quickly right around here yet, And this is another thing it might be hard to see in video. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not, and that is around the edge of this telephone pole, which are just zoomed up on. I can see a green edge here, and I can see a purple magenta one on this side, and you got to see that out there. Tweet. Yep, nope. That happens. Do the lens you're shooting with, and as far as I understand it, it's because you're sending light through the various optical elements that are in your lens and those air curved and it could be similar to sending white light through a prism. You know, if you send it through a prism, it comes out like a rainbow. It's just not a real prison. It's having some of the same quality, so it's just starting to separate those colors. It's not as extreme is what a prison would do, and it's noticed chromatic aberrations. And so if we want to correct for that, when I need to dio is if you look at the various tab, so they're in here. Okay, there's a tab right here. That one is your lens corrections, and if you go in there, there's a check box or removed chromatic aberration. If you turn that on, it'll analyze your picture and try to see if it has that color fringing. And if so, it will try to eliminate it and all you gotta do stern on the check box. I'm Yes, that's in previous versions as well. Although that check box and CS five you might need to update your version of camera in that, I don't know if it was in the version that actually shipped with CS five. Originally, they came up with a revision Soon after that, I think they might have added it then, um, but this area down here is not in CS five. You have just a check box. You don't have these sliders. The's sliders are new in CS six. And to be honest, I haven't had a lot of time to work with him. But you'll find that sometimes after you turn on remove chromatic aberrations. If you look close enough around your image, you might find that you have either purple or a green little halo around the edges of things. It will usually be close to the point where you focused a little, a little bit before behind her in front of where you focused. And if you still see halos in there a purple or green, you could bring up the purple amount slider where the green amount slaughter to try to eliminate them. The slaughters below that determine what range of colors is it trying to eliminate. So if the halo your scene is mainly this kind of magenta e purple and not a bluey purple, you could move this toe limit the range of things it's trying to correct. So you just trying to say what colors am I looking for? And then how much? How aggressively do I need to go after getting rid of them? So that's what it is. I haven't used this lot yet, but if I saw purple or green when I was done, I consider it then. Another thing is, any time you're shooting and you tell your camera up if you tell your camera up, things that are near the top of the frame are usually gonna look smaller because they're further away from the lens. The things they're at the bottom of the frame because they're closer to your camera. And if its architecture, you're gonna have this weird tilt where it looks like a building might be about to fall over. So if that's the case, I might come in here, pull out some shadow detail in this one just so I can see what we're getting. But I would go again to that lens corrections tab, the same place where we found removed chromatic aberration. And then there's a tab and they're called Manual. So I'm in Lens Corrections, and then I clicked on manual. In here, there is a slider called vertical when I click on the vertical slider and I start to move it. It's going to scale down the bottom of my picture or, if I go towards the right, the top of my picture. And it's trying to allow me to correct for what's happening to vertical lines. When I tell my camera up to get a tall building, I try to only tell my camera up on really tall buildings. Then that effect helps. But if it's a short building, I would rather zoom out and recompose where I don't need to tilt up. I might walk across the street to take the shot or do something else, but on occasion I took my camera up without thinking about it. And get that. Now, if you find it's hard to figure out exactly when you got your verticals truly vertical. I think there is a choice on the side menu here called Show Grid. The Keyboard Shark Hottest Letter V all by itself. But I got that from the side menu, which is this little menu over on the right edge. Just below those tabs. Show grid. Then it's a little easier to figure out if you're verticals are truly vertical or if you're still off a little bit. Eso That's another thing I might think about. I've already done that to one of the other images that I have this guy, and if I know I'm gonna have to tilt my camera up to capture all of what I need. Then I always try to add padding, meaning Zoom out a little bit because what happens is when you're on your hero under manual already set this back to its default. It's already been adjusted. You see the verticals or not, they're tilted. Here's what it looks like. Afterwards, I got him to be relatively vertical, But can you see down here in the corners or just some gray stuff coming in? There's a setting called scale. If I bring it down, you could make it so you can see the rest of the image. It's just we don't have enough info there, and I'm not willing to crop in any tighter than about their. And so had I left some Patty had zoomed out a little bit to have some extra space. Any time I tell my camera up, then I'd still have information to fill in those corners. We can still fill in those corners and we'll do that when we talk about panoramas in retouching. I'll show you how Have photo shop invent information to fill that stuff in. So I just wanted to show you a few before and after us when it came to raw. So you get a sense for on a normal picture, one that might not have started out being overly bright, overly dark, like some of the bad ones. We've worked on what it might look like before and after just to get a sense. So here shot this one in Iceland and I'm just gonna choose camera defaults. And the color was relatively dull. If you look at the original, if I choose undo Versailles and results, you can look at my sliders and see how many of my moved and I moved a lot of them really far. Contrast is way up. Whites is way down vibrance his way up. You know that kind of stuff, but we've talked about what the sliders do. It's just a matter of how do you interpret damage the highlights. Being way down is to get me some detail in the sky. If I didn't have that my sky would be a bit brighter. Whites being way down is doing the same thing, trying to get detail in my sky. Without it, we looked like this. So if I get rid of both whites and highlights, see how bright that sky was. But once I bring my highlights in my whites, town has able to get something out of there. But doing that can sometimes make the image look dull. So I brought up contrast. Here's how dull it looked after doing that. Bring my contrast up and it made it pop. Then vibrance just brought the color out. So if I bring vibrance back down to it's default, color looks kind of mellow. Bring it up. You got to where I liked so get a little sense what they're to me. The original image that my camera captured is just raw material waiting for me to get in there and mess with it and make a much better image. So let's take a look at this one. Kamerad defaults. That's what came out of the camera. Here's what I ended up with. It's not always radical, but in here I got quite a bit of detail and the way I got that detail in this area here was we're bringing my highlights down in the way I got the detail down here is by bringing my shadows up, and I also brought up clarity and vibrance to make the image pop more. Here's another one, and this one looks really dark on my screen. I hope it looks little lighter on yours. But here's the defaults. Here's my interpretation of this is with the old version of photo Shop, and I move the sliders quite far, but it's just me interpreting the image.