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Lesson 7 from: Developing and Retouching in Lightroom Desktop

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

7. Details

Next Lesson: Optics

Lesson Info

Details

So that brings us to the details section of light room desktop and in the details section. It's mostly just sharpening and noise reduction that that that's what the details are. So we're talking getting in really, really close to an image and seeing how sharp it is and whether there's noise. So it's kind of the pixel peaking, peeping, the pixel peeping level most of the time, if you're shooting a sharp image, you probably don't have to do a lot of sharpening to it. But I need you to notice something. And that is that. It used to be that sharpening in light room was at about 25 was kind of this standard. And then, for some reason, Adobe decided that it was better to have it at 40 which I kind of disagree with that. So I don't think that it should actually be a 40. And by the way, this has a little triangle on it, too. So it's It's open now, but it could be collapsed when you first see it. So if you see it this way, remember any of those triangles open him up. Eso The sharpening, I think...

, is mawr likely gonna be better somewhere down in the 30 range or something like that, maybe 25. I think that's a better place for it, especially with the new me relist cameras like the Canon E O. S. R is a super sharp camera. Super sharp lenses like it is a really sharp camera. It's making very sharp images, and so 40 is way too sharp, and so everything looks crunching. It just looks too sharp. So pay attention to that and make a decision for yourself as to what is too sharp. But I think 40 is too sharp. Um, but sharpening, I think, should stay right down here in the 25 30 range. But Radius should go up, and the reason that is is that sharpening is the actual difference between the shadows and the highlights. So sharpening is not actually riel. It's, um, it's not taking something in sharpening it was doing is it's adding contrast to two different sides of a black white line, and so the if you take the black and make it of the white and make it whiter and take the black and make it blacker. That line looks sharper and So it's all a lot about contrast levels. And so the more you sharpen, the more you increase those levels, and you do it at a pixel level. So if I take and I'm gonna I need to go in the, um, effects panel here and turn off the grain so you can actually see the image without grain. Um, and by the way, any time you add grain to an image, you probably need to add a little bit of sharpness, at least in the radius to it. T to create a little bit more of that sharpness underneath that grain because the grain tends toe toe, um, obliterate like I'll eyelashes and stuff like that. So it's better to get a little punch out of that contrast after you add grain. But in the details, if I take the sharpening all the way up, you can see that I've almost created what looks like a canvas look because I've created texture and it's not texture. It's not sharpening her texture. It's sharpening the texture of the grid of all of my pixels, so it's sharpening pixel to pixel, so you can tell that sharpening is not a really super good tool because it's it's kind of, ah destructive thing and keeps it's just too much. So that's why I say 40 is too much. But if you, instead of using the sharpening amount if you use radius, look at the difference here is I go up. It doesn't ruin the individual pixels. What it does is it finds things like her eyebrow on her eyelashes and the edges of her, um, iris and the line of her lips and even some of like, the the wrinkles in her lips and things like that. That's what it's doing. So it's finding big things, and it's sharpening those big things. So radius low. I'm sorry, sharpening low radius, high detail. You can kind of fuss with it and see what you like. Generally speaking, I leave it where it is, but it could go up to maybe even 50 and then masking is an interesting beast, because if you take masking and you increase it, you basically say, Don't sharpen anything on the face until you hit the eyes. And then on Lee Sharpe in You know, the areas that air of high contrast and so you can kind of fuss with that until you get it right. Um, and it does fine, But often times it can create like weird issues right here, next to where it's about to sharpen because it's on its way into the sharpening. And so you get like, skin that is soft and then skin that's sharp right before it hits something that it's about to sharpen. And so then you get these weird inconsistencies and skin. So I generally think that the masking is actually a tool that they haven't ever really advanced it very much. And it doesn't do a great job. So I would rather if I need to do something with skin all paint in my own softening on the skin. So usually I just leave masking off. So that is how we sharpened things. And, of course, sharpening something with a person is very different than sharpening. Say, um, texture on a building or something like that. So I'm coming back here, and I'm looking at the the roof here, and I and there's so much texture to sharpen and play around with here, and that sharpening is very different than say face again. I don't want to go in and do crazy sharpening here because it's going to create the same weird effects. So instead, what I want to do is take the radius up on the Radius is gonna sharpened things without creating a weird texture to the photograph. And then detail usually works pretty well here, too. So here's no detail. Here's full detail. I'm I'm swinging wide so that you can see the difference. No detail, full detail, and he want to zoom in all the way and take a look at it and see what it's doing. But an important point to know about contrast are sorry about sharpening is that you really ought to be looking at your images at the size they're going to be seen when you do the sharpening. Don't sharpen at the pixel level. If you zoom in one for one or two for one or three for one you like, really bury yourself in the photograph and you're sharpening Minute Lee there when you back away from it and put it on a canvas that's, you know, inches wide. Um, but it's on Ah, wall. That's and it's really high, and no one's gonna be anywhere close to that image. You may have just sharpened at the wrong amount because you were this close to it. Um, Conversely, if you make a small image, you might not even have to sharpen it all because it's so small. It'll just look sharp because it's small. Eso be aware of what you're doing with the image before you start sharpening it because you might over or under sharpen it based on the size that it's gonna be printed. Eso general sharpening is good and again sharpen amount is low. Radius is high details Somewhere between 40 ish, masking is generally off on, and that's how I do sharpening. Now let's talk a little bit about noise reduction. So I'm gonna go to a different image for this noise reduction because I want you to see what something looks like without any noise reduction and without any color noise reduction. So I'm zooming into the wall here and you can see all of these little red and green pixels or showing up. Now the higher your eyes, so is the more you're gonna have this the worst your camera is, the more you're gonna have this so if you have a really nice camera and you have a really low I so you're not going to see any noise and you're not gonna see any color noise, but I shoot pretty high eso quite a bit. So I'm at 16. 326,400 quite often. And so I will see a lot of color and noise if I am using an older camera. But if I'm using a newer camera, some of the cameras I just shot with a Panasonic Sonic s one and that thing has, I mean, it has almost no noise. At 6400 I could shoot 6400 all day long, and it's just it's beautiful. It looks great. Eso the cannon, Siri's Mark four and the US are both have very low noise 6400. But every camera needs color noise reduction, and that's this one here. So it is at a 25 all the time because every camera has color noise, and so we always remove that color noise. It's that those red and green pixels. So this is what it looks like without, and this is what it looks like with just standard normal color noise reduction. So 25 is not something heroic. is natural. Um, I see a little bit more greens in there and things like that. There's some right here, and so I can increase cause listens kind of noisy, so I can increase this to about 50. And that's about as far as I ever have to go. I've never gone beyond 50 on color noise reduction, and I can't see really any color noise at all there, so I'm pretty good with color noise now. The other thing that I want to look at is the noise itself, so noise reduction is quite impressive. So let's let's zoom back in here so that we can see. And by the way, these have their own drop downs as well. So you can see that on color noise, you have some further adjustments that you can make, um, as to like, if it starts to lose detail, you can increase the detail if you need to increase the smoothness of things. But generally speaking, believe all of this alone, because most of it's going to be 25 you're good, but noise reduction. Um, that's something that you'll definitely want open. Because when you hit noise reduction, I'm gonna start increasing the noise reduction. And it's it's doing a great job of getting rid of a lot of that noise, that grain looking stuff. But it's also starting to soften up the edges of the bricks. It's doing a pretty good job keeping the edges, the bricks. I mean, look at all that texture that's still there, even though I'm a 22 noise reduction. But I can increase the detail, and that helps to increase the edges of the bricks but still keep my noise reduction. So I'm reducing noise, and at the same time I'm renew deducing noise. I'm increasing my detail so that it holds it and then contrast helps. That weighs well. It just kind of helps a little bit more. So here's no contrast. Here's a little bit you can just see. That's hard to see it, but it's just a little extra sharpness in those details. So, generally speaking, if I need to do noise reduction, I'm gonna be in something that looks like this. It's a little bit of noise reduction between about 20 and 40 ish. I I almost never go up above 50 because it's just too much of softens things too much eso somewhere in the twenties and then this is going to be somewhere midway up. So 75% up, Um, and then contrast is going to be somewhere in the bottom half, and that generally gives me lots of good detail, but it also removes all the noise. So I mean, this is a really nice file for being a really dark area and a lot of noise, and that is everything in your detail. Panel eso when you need to sharpen something when you need to remove noise, that's where he goes into the detail panel.

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Workflow in Adobe Lightroom
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Adobe Lightroom Image Pipeline System
Black & White Preset Collection
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