Removing "Noise" with Lightroom

One of the biggest advantages of digital cameras or DSLR’s over their film counterparts is the ability to switch ISO settings on the fly. ISO is the amount of light that you let into the camera’s sensor and in the days of film cameras this was accomplished with film speed, sometimes called ASA instead of ISO.

So if you wanted to shoot outdoors, you would load a roll of ISO or ASA 100 or 200 and be good to go, but if you then moved into a dimly lit building and wanted to shoot, you needed either a flash on that camera or you needed to have used up that roll of 100 or 200 film and switch to 400 or 800 to shoot well in those conditions.

With the advent of the digital camera, you can shoot outdoors at ISO 100, and then step indoors and with the flip of a switch or wheel, shoot at ISO 800 or even higher like 6400 or maybe even 12,800. The problem is as your ISO gets higher, you get digital “noise” in your photos. Noise is the little dots, speckles or grain look in your image that I am sure most everyone has seen at one time or another.

See the grains of noise in this image. I shot indoors at ISO 2000

 Some cameras are better at others at handling high ISO, low noise, but at some point even the best of these cameras will end up with noise in your images and it can make the image ugly and unusable. Luckily, Lightroom can help mitigate this for you and make this image useable again.

When you load your images in Lightroom and come across an image that has noise, this is how you can clean it up in the Lightroom Develop Module. The two big noise removal sliders are under the Detail section and called Luminance and Color.

After some Luminance and Color noise reduction notice the image is much cleaner

Here is what each does. Luminance: This kind of noise affects the brightness, but not the color, of individual pixels. If you had a picture of a dark grey piece of paper with a great deal of luminance noise it would appear similar to old-school television static with lots of light and dark fuzz.

Color or sometimes called Chroma noise: This shows up as oddly-colored pixels, scattered throughout an image, almost like someone has tossed a handful of red, blue, and green grains of sand at it. Lightroom calls this “Color” noise, but it’s just another term for Chroma noise.
Now, although you can remove considerable noise with Lightroom, you want to make sure you are careful not to use too much noise reduction as it can make the images look fake and give everything a plastic look. A lot of pros will counter some of the effects of the noise reduction by using some sharpening as well for the best results.

A side by side of the before on the left and after on the right.

 As you can see in my side by side before and after shot, the Lightroom noise reduction did help clean up this image a lot.

Comments/Questions

Keep Down the Noise!

This week I thought I’d write about another subject that I am frequently asked about, noise. First let’s take a look at noise as it pertains to photography. What is noise? Well, noise is the pixelation that happens in your images when you use too much ISO.

Many of the new cameras are capable of high ISO settings, some as high as 256,000 believe it or not. Increasing the ISO on your camera allows you to compensate for low light conditions but is not the ideal way to compensate for it. The ISO setting makes your cameras sensor more sensitive to lighting and your exposure. As you move the number higher, you camera is able to pull in more light from the available light in the conditions. The bad part is when you go too high in ISO, you start getting noise introduced into your images and they start to look sloppy instead of having a nice, fine quality.

Even though most modern cameras can go to large ISO settings, it’s not recommended to do so as the quality of your image will suffer. If you ask most any professional photographer, they will tell you that the maximum ISO that anyone should ever use is ISO 800, as once you get above ISO 800, noise really becomes an issue. Ideally, they will go on to tell you that ISO 50 or 100 is the best to use as it offers the finest quality to the final image. So, how do you keep down the noise if you are shooting in less than ideal lighting conditions? By using a better lens, capable of a wider aperture to allow more light to reach your sensor or by using artificial lighting, such as strobes or continuous, hot light kits.

This image shot at ISO 3200, notice all the noise?

The wide lens option is the best as a lens with a wider aperture will naturally allow more light in. Thins of the aperture of your lens as being the same as the pupil in your eye. When you are in low light conditions, your pupils enlarge so that your eyes can take in more light and allow you to see better. If it’s a bright, sunny day your pupils will become very small as you don’t need as much light allowed in to see. Aperture works the same way as your pupil, when you have a wide aperture lens, say an F/1.4 your lens is opened up allowing more ambient light into your sensor to make the exposure. The down side of wide aperture lenses is that they are generally expensive. Take the most popular lens from one of my earlier posts, the 70-200mm. As I mentioned in that earlier post the 70-200mm from Canon comes in two apertures, F/4 and F/2.8. The F/4, which I currently own is a fantastic lens and takes beautiful images with outdoor light, but if I needed to shoot indoors, say at a concert or indoor sports like basketball the F/2.8 will work better because it can open wider than the F/4 and let more of the natural light in that environment into my sensor. The difference in price is significant, with the 70-200mm F/4 L lens costing around $800 and the 70-200mm F/2.8 costing around $2,100.

Same image shot at ISO 100, notice the fine quality?

As I mentioned earlier in this post, the other option to prevent noise is to use artificial lighting such as a Speedlite external flash, or full blown strobes or even hot lights. These will allow you to keep your cameras ISO down really low if the lights are powerful enough to compensate for the poor natural lighting. Flash is not ideal in most low light conditions such as concerts or indoor sports as the flash is distracting, which is why if you are at a basketball game or watching one on TV you will notice that most all of the sports photographers there will have no flash but will instead be using that big fat F/2.8 70-200mm to get the shots they need for sports magazines and websites.

Now, since most of the AI family reading this post are students, I am assuming you are not rich enough to buy all your lenses at F/2.8 or wider as it is very costly. I would recommend to you that you invest in one expensive F/2.8 zoom such as the 70-200mm and buy the rest of your lenses in whatever aperture you can afford and use. If you do want to buy a good 70-200mm F/2.8, then you can always rent one from www.borrowlenses.com or from www.lumoid.com. I personally love Lumoid as they let you try before you buy and if you want to own that lens, they will split that cost up over three months to make it more affordable. I am not certain Borrow Lenses offers the same option as I have never used them but I know Reuben has and he can probably best answer that question.

Now get out there and make some great images.

Comments/Questions

Get out of Auto Mode

Happy Sunday Everyone, my name is Bill and I am the new Sunday Ambassador. I am a Senior at AIOP and will be here with you at least until I graduate in January. If you have any questions or need to reach me you can email sundayambassador@gmail.com. Now, let's get into my first Blog post!

One of the challenges when starting out as a photographer is getting yourself out of your comfort zone. Many students find themselves using their Auto mode on their cameras because they are intimidated by the Manual mode.

    When using Manual mode, you have to know how to use all of the settings on the camera, what is known as the “Holy trinity” of photography. What I mean by this is ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speed. Once you have the hang of these three settings on your camera and how to use them to create the proper exposure, you are well on your way to becoming an accomplished photography professional.

    Now it doesn’t matter if you shoot with Canon, Nikon, Sony or another manufacturer’s camera, they all have these three basic settings and balancing them is how to create the proper exposure. Additionally, all of these cameras have whats known as an exposure meter and it is usually visible on the LCD screen on the back of the camera, as well as in the viewfinder.

The exposure meter in the camera is the set of tick marks toward the top of the screen with the numbers from left to right starting with -3 and moving to +3 on the right. “Perfect” exposure is the point in the dead center with the 0 and each tick mark is 1/3 of an F-stop. When your exposure meter is to the left of the 0, your shot will be under exposed and when it’s to the right of the 0, your shot will be over exposed. The next thing you are probably asking is “ok, how do I move my indicator to the 0 when I am taking a photo, is there a proper sequence?” Yes there is and I am going to share that with you now.

    One of the things that throws new photographers off is figuring out how to adjust their settings under Manual mode so that they get a nice, clean shot with “perfect” exposure. I will share the formula that I use. The first thing you want to do is set your shutter speed and the best shutter speed to use is one that is proportional to the focal length of your lens, especially if your
lens doesn’t have IS (Canon’s Image Stabilization) VR (Nikon’s Vibration Reduction) to compensate for the shake of your hand as you hold your camera. Many students don’t realize that if you set your shutter speed too low it will actually emphasize hand shake and their images turn out blurry. So, let’s say you are using a 70-300mm lens and you are shooting at the 300mm end of your focal length, you want to set your shutter speed to 320 or 400 as it will compensate for the camera shake and your photos should turn out nice and clear and not blurry.

    The next piece of the formula is the Aperture of your camera/lens combination. You want to start with your lens at it’s widest Aperture, or lowest number if it’s easier to remember that way, so on your 70-300mm lens, let’s say the Aperture is F/4-5.6. This means that when you are shooting at 70mm your widest Aperture is F/4 and as you zoom in with the lens the widest is F/5.6 at 300mm. So on your 70-300mm lens at 300mm you start at F/5.6 and you can narrow the Aperture from there to reduce the amount of light that enters your lens. Now I don’t like to go too small on my Aperture, so I will usually top at around F/8-10. At this point you are probably wondering what ISO you should use. Well if you ask most professional photographers they will tell you that you want to use the lowest ISO you can to get the shot. Most pros won’t use anything higher than ISO 800 and the reason is as you raise your ISO you introduce more noise into your photos. What is noise you ask, noise is the little speckles you see in your images when the ISO is too high as in the example photo below, which I took in my office with low light at night time.

If you look you will see the little speckles of noise in this shot because I used ISO 3200, which on my older Canon 5D causes noise as it does not have the newer electronics of the Canon 5D Mark III, which can use ISO 3200 with less noise in the final image. But in order to prevent noise entirely, I recommend starting with your ISO at 100 or 50 if you have a Pro body that can do ISO 50, most consumer cameras like the Canon T3i you can get through AI has ISO 100 as it’s bottom end.

    So now that we have talked about ISO if you start at ISO 100 and you are shooting outdoors in good daylight, then you want to only adjust your shutter speed and Aperture to get your shot to “perfect” exposure. Now, let’s say you are shooting in low light and want to get to perfect exposure and you are using say the Canon 85mm F/1.8 USM portrait lens. In this case, again start with ISO 100 and your shutter speed at 100 and then open your Aperture wider to introduce more light, so instead of using F/5.6, open those blades and get your Aperture down to F/2 or F/1.8 and see if that will get you to the 0 on your exposure meter. If Aperture does not do the trick, then start adjusting your ISO higher but I would recommend capping it as ISO 800. If at ISO 800 you are still too under exposed then it’s time to introduce a flash to your shot. The flash will help raise the amount of light in the room, but I do not recommend using your camera’s built in flash, I would recommend an external flash preferably one that has bounce and zoom and turn the flash to point behind you at the ceiling or a wall so that the light will not be too harsh. Equipped with the flash, you can now set your ISO much lower and reduce the possibility of noise in your images.

    Now you know the formula for using your camera in Manual mode, so get out there make some awesome images! Please feel free to comment and ask any questions you might have.

 

Comments/Questions

Photographing a Moving Target

Good Morning, AIPOD World! This past weekend I had the privilege to document the first annual retreat for a non-profit organization called Girls with Guts. These girls really do have a lot of guts to deal triumphantly with the physical ordeals they live with on a day-in and day-out basis.

One of the activities they participated in was a zip-line over a deep ravine. I stood down below in the ravine and tried to photograph each of them as they traversed it in a 16-second trip. Using my 300mm lens with my file size on Camera Raw so I got the max amount of digital file, I focused on them at the starting point, and tried to follow them across, turning as they passed overhead. It sounds much easier than it was. They started in the woods, up a stairway in the trees. This photographed best at ISO 1250 at f/19 at 1/125 sec. By the time they were overhead the camera was metering f/19 at 1/750 sec. Then they went back into wooded area and the metering changed back to f/19 at 1/125 sec.

photos by Connie Rohne

So how do you manage your camera in a situation like that. Believe me I was desperate enough to try “P” for “program” but those results were not pretty. What were the main problems? First, my camera could not decipher where to focus quickly enough, when I was set on auto focus. So that meant I had to be able to manually focus-quickly. Second moving from dark treed areas to clear sky overhead was an extremely drastic light change. I would have loved to change my ISO from 1250 to 100 when overhead, but that was impossible in an 4 second time frame, and then changing back again for the other side.

I tried the AV (aperture priority) mode, thinking I could keep my shutter speed consistent and change my aperture to control the light getting in. Setting my aperture at 4.0 was, however, a great recipe for out of focus images with subjects moving so quickly over me. The lighting concept was right, but there was too much variation in light. Also I needed the higher ISO to get more detail in the dark areas in the trees. Overhead the aperture setting wouldn't allow for enough change to control the light getting in at that ISO.

So back to M, manual, my mainstay.  I could focus with one hand, and dial my shutter speed with the other.  My subjects were traveling about 500 feet in 16 seconds, or just over 31 feet per second. Setting my aperture to f/19 gave me a good depth of field to catch them in focus. I really needed a high shutter speed to freeze their movement. I found the 1/125 sec gave me a nice crisp image. That took care of both ends of the zip line in the wooded area. When they passed over my head 1/125 second was totally blown out, you could barely see the shape of a person in the brightness. Dialing my shutter speed up as they came out into the skylight to 1/500 or 1/750 gave me beautiful blue skies and still enough details in the shadows on my subjects to capture great expressions.

This was a new challenge for me. Actually this was a week of new challenges for me. I hope to share some more of them with you next week.

Have a great day. Go out and try something new and challenging!