Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta Noise Reduction

Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta Noise Reduction
Monday, October 26, 2009

The default noise reduction implementation in Adobe Lightroom has dramatically changed with the Adobe Lightroom 3 beta. High ISO rendering in the Lightroom 3 beta now resembles that of Raw Developer or Capture One more than it resembles that of Lightroom 2.

Here's an example using two 100% crops from an ISO 1600, 1/4s, f/5.5, 48mm image I took this weekend with the Panasonic GH1 and kit zoom in low light. On the left is the default LR2 conversion, on the right the default LR3 beta conversion:

The change is, to my eye, a significant improvement. For the first time, I am considering Adobe Lightroom as a first line RAW processing application.

Posted by Amin Labels: Lightroom 3 beta

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Thomas Fitzgerald · 806 weeks ago

I was blown away when I tried out Lightroom 3. I've always had an issue with Lightroom's raw conversions. I've tried it with a few cameras and the results are always favouribe. On the LX2 it seems sharper and clearer, but LR's lx2 support was always pretty good. Having said that at high ISO's it's much better. And I know it's not a compact, but on my 5D2 though the change is substantial. There's significantly less smearing of detail and everything looks cleaner and sharper. It also get's rid of the 5D's shadow banding issue which is a huge plus. I can't wait for the final version. I might finally be able to put the ageing Aperture to bed once and for all.

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Peter F · 806 weeks ago

But I thought there was no access to the luminence slider, only the color noise reduction slider? How did you get such nice results without having access to both....

Also, did you adjust the sharpening in both the LR2 and LR3 versions of the image you've posted?

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1 reply · active 806 weeks ago

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amin 67p · 806 weeks ago

What I posted was the straight, default conversion except highlight retention adjusted to +20% or so in both. Otherwise, I didn't touch a thing!

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Gman · 806 weeks ago

Looks slightly sharper, which is what I have seen from other samples. But the orange rose looks like it loses some definition in the LR3b conversion.

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1 reply · active 805 weeks ago

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Quillcards 6p · 805 weeks ago

I agree - there seems to be more definition and more tonal differences in the LR2 crop.

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Sebastien · 806 weeks ago

Speaking of image quality, what I'm actually seeing in my LR3 is a *lot* of aliasing.
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/512631?tstart=0
http://forums.adobe.com/servlet/JiveServlet/downl...

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guest · 806 weeks ago

It looks better than LR2. Have you made any comparisons with Capture One or Bibble Pro?

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1 reply · active less than 1 minute ago

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amin 67p · 806 weeks ago

Not yet. I think C1 has actually taken a bit of a step backwards. I preferred the rendering in C1 v3.x to v4, but C1 v4 is still very good. Have never used Bibble Pro.

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dbm · 806 weeks ago

What I hope is that when luminance NR is implemented, setting it to zero really will set it to zero: otherwise I can see people trying to hack the beta so that it works for ever!

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oluv · 806 weeks ago

wow, this looks great! finally some natural looking noise. amin, have you tried the new LR beta on some low-iso GH1 files? i would like to see how the noise-structure looks like and how fine detail is retained.
if you manage you could convert one of my G1 files with quite a lot of fine detail, maybe you could convert it without any sharpening, so that i can try my own settings. here is the link to the raw file:
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/893528/P1030893.RW2

i would also like to see what LR3 beta does with this sample:
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/893528/P1050130.RW2

thanks a lot in advance!

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2 replies · active 806 weeks ago

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amin 67p · 806 weeks ago

I think it does a nice job with low ISO as well. Here are your converted files, no NR or sharpening applied: http://www.box.net/shared/2v89j53xzm

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oluv · 806 weeks ago

thanks amin. first i didn't know the beta is free, but now i downloaded it too and played a bit with it yesterday. i am quite impressed! much better than any lightroom or ACR version before, if i hadn't seen your post, i wouldn't have even tried it. now i even think lightroom will finally become my main converter. i even converted an iso3200 file from G1 with it and it looked good. i like the natural noise and i like the new sharpening algorithm much more, which doesn't seem to be a simple unsharp mask. the old lightroom or ACR sharpening had quite an aquarell look to it. but i discovered that if i had opened my raws in ACR before, lightroom would use the same conversion-settings, including the old sharpening, which was strange. i had to reset the conversion settings, then it would use the new sharpening.
it doesn't seem to extract equally much details as C1 or raw therapee, but it has fewer artefacts and a much better overall look than ACR 5.5
i always liked the controls from ACR including fill-light, recovery etc. therefore i really welcome the improved rendering of the new beta.
the chroma noise reduction is also much better than it was before, it virtually eliminates all high-iso chroma noise, except the very low-frequency color-blotches. but most NR programs have problems with it.
i am curious to see how their luminance NR will work, although i am sure i will still prefer to use neatimage etc.

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Linh 36p · 805 weeks ago

This is very promising. I'm waiting till they release LR3 fully, but am somewhat bummed now that I spent the money on the Nik software collection for LR. I was going to buy SilverEfex and Dfine anyway, so it was marginal to get the complete kit. But now that LR has a pretty good NR algorithm, and new grain control, I feel like I wasted a bit, heh

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oluv · 805 weeks ago

what i noticed though is some demosaicing problems with GF1 and GH1.
the G1 looks perfect. very nice regular grain. but the GF1 produces some labyrinth-like patterns. it is also slightly visible in your first crop, amin.
here two crops, the left from GF1, the right one from G1.
http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/7476/noisegf1g...

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1 reply · active 371 weeks ago

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