Tag Archives: reduction

Lightroom Noise Reduction Update Testing

One of the software tools that I find a lot of people talking about these days is DeNoise from Topaz.  I have never been terribly bothered by noise in my images.  Modern cameras do a pretty remarkable job of handling noise and, for most usage purposes, the noise is not really an issue if it is there.  I have posted my efforts with PureRAW in its various forms where I have tried it out to see how the noise reduction comes out and, while I have seen strengths and weaknesses in it, I have never seen it as something I needed to spend on.

Lightroom Classic had one of its periodic updates recently.  The big new feature was their own denoise functionality.  Much like my experimentation with PureRAW, it analyzes the shot and creates a new DNG file with the noise suppressed.  I was curious to see how it would perform and, seeing as it is included in the price of my subscription, I have it anyway.  I decided to take some shots I had recently used for the PureRAW3 trial I had done and compare with the Lightroom version.

It defaulted to a 50 level of noise reduction.  I don’t know whether this is a percentage and what of but it is a scale so I played with it.  I did some at 50 and some at 75 to see whether more aggressive noise reduction had detrimental effects on other parts of the image.  Comparing these things and then sharing the results is a touch tricky so I have created a single image from four layers.  They are the original Lightroom develop settings, the PureRAW3 version, the 75 denoise settings and the 50 denoise settings.  I mask them to make the image into four sections.  Then, to make it useful on here, I have zoomed in to show the borders between them to provide some sort of comparison.

The PureRAW3 result is very aggressive on noise reduction.  However, I find it can make some odd artifacts in the images where details were not that clear to begin with.  The 75 setting in Lightroom provided a very similar level of noise reduction to PureRAW3.  It is slightly noisier but barely enough to matter.  A setting of 50 does show more noise.  It is still a significant improvement over the basic Camera Raw settings and very usable.

What do I conclude from all of this?  First, as I have said before when testing the PureRAW trials, it provides some interesting results but it is not relevant to enough of my work to matter to me sufficient for me to spend a bunch of money on buying it.  Having denoise in Lightroom now provides me with a very similar option but within the existing price I am paying for Lightroom.  Therefore, I will make use of it when the situation dictates.  It would be a regular part of my workflow because really high ISO shots are only an occasional thing for me but having it there when I want it will be handy.

Experimenting with PureRAW3

This blog includes a very infrequent series of posts reviewing the processing powers of PureRAW.  The third version of this raw image processor has just been released and I downloaded the trial to see how it performs.  I was impressed by what the previous version did to clean up some high ISO shots but the need was limited and the price was high enough that I didn’t see the point in signing up for it.  I was curious as to whether the third version would change my mind.

When I download one of these trials, I always try to avoid installing it until I have time to play with it.  The trial last 30 days so I want to make sure I make good use of the time.  Once I got around to installing it, I put it to work.  I was disappointed to find the trial was limited to 20 images at a time which is a little restrictive but, for the purposes of evaluating it, I could work around this.  I had two things I wanted to do.  First, I wanted to convert some shots that I had previously tried for PureRAW2 to see how different they were.  Second, I had some recent night shots which I also wanted to try.

So, how did it perform?  Results were mixed.  I found the conversion process was quick sometimes and would slow down or stop on others.  This was annoying but I suspect is something that they will fix before too long so I wasn’t that worried.  What I was surprised about was that, when starting the process in Lightroom, the new DNGs will be reimported into Lightroom.  However, this was unbelievably slow.  I would set it off, the conversion would finish and then, a long time later, they would suddenly get added.  Again, something that is probably going to get fixed but bloody annoying in the mean time.

As for the output, I was quite amazed by the results.  I will show here some of the Lightroom edits along with PureRAW2 and PureRAW3 versions of the files.  As you can see, the latest version really does clean up images a lot.  However, I don’t think it is all good.  Some of the shots feel like they have been over sharpened and look too crunchy.  Also, the algorithm seems to get imaginative when it comes to lettering on airframes.  Some of the results have created shapes that just are not there in the original shot.  For some shots, this might not be an issue but, when something is supposed to be recognizable, the odd artifacts show up conspicuously.  If the shot had been soft and noisy, you wouldn’t have worried but, because it is supposed to be clear and sharp, the weird results stand out.

Is it worth it?  Not for me.  I used it on some more normal exposures and couldn’t really see much benefit.  Certainly not enough to make the effort worth it.  For high noise, it does provide some nice results and some odd side effects but, I don’t shoot enough of them to make that really worthwhile.  For now, it shall sit in the interesting but not interesting enough category.  Maybe we shall have the fourth installment of this series when PureRAW4 comes out!

High ISO Shooting and Processing Technique

I watched a video on YouTube about a way to process shots taken in low light with high ISOs to improve the noise performance.  I wasn’t particularly interested in the approach until I was down on the shore as the sun was going down and I was using a long lens.  I figured this might be a good time to try it out.  The approach is to shoot a lot of shots.  You can’t have anything moving in the shots for this to work but, if it is a static scene, the approach can be used.

Shoot as many shots as you can.  Then import them in to Photoshop as layers.  Use the align function to make sure that they are all perfectly aligned and then use the statistics function to do a mean calculation of the image.  You can do this a couple of ways in Photoshop.  You can make a smart object and then process it or you can process through Statistics.  The averaging function takes a lot of the noise out of the shot.  If you have lots of images, you can make it effectively disappear.  I wasn’t prepared to make that many shots but I tried it with a reasonable number of images.  The whole image isn’t really of interest.  Instead, I include one of the images cropped in and the processed image similarly cropped to allow you to compare.

Wingtip Treatments

Richard Whitcomb was an aerodynamicist at NASA who pioneered a number of technologies that benefit the aviation world today.  One of those was his development of winglets.  These are the wingtip treatments that improve lift to drag ratio and climb performance without significantly extending the wing.  While his work was clear, it took a while for them to be implemented widely.  Now, most aircraft involve some sort of wingtip extension.  However, the first aircraft to replicate his design approach was the MD-11.

The MD-11 had a split winglet with a larger extension upwards and a smaller one downwards.  This reflected some of Whitcomb’s original drawings.  Strangely, after this, the focus was on upward winglets only (although the Airbus approach for a while was what they called a fence on the wingtip which was something more in keeping with the Whitcomb approach).  Recently, there has been a return to the original with APB introducing the Split Scimitar and Boeing producing their own Split Winglet design (not as elegant as the APB approach in my mind.

Most airliners and many business jets now incorporate a tweaked wing tip configuration.  Maximizing the aerodynamic performance requires squeezing as much as you can out of the design within the space constraints you have.  The following pictures are examples of the different types used.

Scimitar Tips

wpid12898-AU0E5001.jpgAviation Partners Boeing has been very effective over the years in getting their technology into mainline airline service. The winglets they developed for the Boeing 737 have been very widely adopted with installations on 300 Series, 700 Series, 800 Series and 900 Series jets around the world. The BBJs have also had them extensively. I don’t think any new 737s are delivered without them. The programs for the 757 and 767 have also been well adopted.

wpid12891-AU0E6181.jpgThe 737 Max is going to have a new winglet design that Boeing have created. However, it is a way from flying. Meanwhile, APB has not stood still and they have created a new winglet design that has a downward portion mated to an updated winglet under the name scimitar. This is now making an appearance on a lot of jets as a retrofit. Southwest, United and Alaska have all started rolling the installation out.

wpid12895-AU0E7585.jpgI like the look of the new design. The tip seems to be a bit of a styling effort. The downward facing portion is well aligned to avoid creating a drag inducing choke area at the root. The configuration is actually quite reminiscent of the original winglet designs in the paper Richard Whitcomb wrote when first proposing the concept. I suspect we shall be seeing a lot more of them in the future.

wpid12889-C59F5208.jpgwpid12902-AU0E5007.jpg wpid12893-AU0E7316.jpg

Photoshop CC Shake Reduction

While a lot of people have been quite vexed by the introduction of a subscription based approach to the Adobe software suite including Photoshop, I decided to get over it and upgrade to Photoshop CC.  One of the features introduced in CC is Shake Reduction.  This is an effort at dealing with motion blur in images.  It isn’t going to rescue a crappy shot but it is potentially able to to take an almost good shot and rescue it.  I decided to experiment with it on an image I recently took.

wpid7287-C59F2218-Edit-2.jpgThe image above is a combination of the original image without sharpening and the filtered version.  (It is recommended that you turn off sharpening before running the filter or it will make things break up more.)  The effect actually seems to be quite useful.  I should note that I tried it on several shots and they didn’t all respond as well to the filter.  However, it did make quite a good upgrade to this image.  I shall potentially use this again if there is an image I really like that is not quite as sharp as I would like.  Another tool to potentially use but not one I think I can rely on.

Playing with Noise Reduction

One of the biggest developments that there has been in digital imaging in recent years has been the improvement of performance in low light.  A few years ago, it was hard to get a decent image at above ISO400 and much post processing work was required to try and make the images workable.  Plug-ins for noise reduction were very popular.  However, the camera manufacturers have been very aggressive in developing chips and processors that allow shooting at ISO levels that would have been unthinkable a while back.  You hear of cameras being perfectly acceptable at ISO6400 and above.

My cameras are not the newest on the market but there are certainly not slouches in low light.  However, I have never been terribly happy with the performance at high ISO settings with the image breaking up a bit when viewed up close.  This is where I have to admit that I can be a complete idiot sometimes.

I shoot RAW all of the time and then process the images in Lightroom.  I have created some presets of development settings that I apply each time I import an image and which then acts as the starting point for any additional editing.  This is where my problem lies and why it has taken me so long to realize it I can’t imagine.  Anyway, enough of the self-flagellation and on with the topic.

The problem lies in the Detail section of the Develop module.  This is where sharpening and noise reduction are applied.  I have some basic settings I start with here and, when I was importing shots taken at high ISO settings, I was not changing them.  I would play with the noise reduction but things still didn’t look right.  The problem was, of course, the sharpening.  The basic setting I had entered was sharpening far too much for the ISO setting and was causing some odd breakup of the image.  I finally realized this one morning while lying in bed – I have no idea why I was thinking of this but it suddenly came to me.

I got up and opened some high ISO images and went to the detail area.  I zeroed out the sharpening and the noise reduction.  Everything looked awful.  Then I brought back the noise reduction and things suddenly started looking a lot better.  When I was happy with the noise, it was time to bring back some sharpening.  Things were a little soft after the noise was taken out so the sharpening brought back a bit of punch to the image.  A tweak on the amount and opening up the radius a bit made things look good.  Then a more aggressive level of masking of the sharpening and suddenly the image was looking way better than before.

When I was happy with things, I saved a new preset that was just sharpening and noise reduction and labeled it as High ISO Detail.  Now I can apply it to any images that need it and be in a far better starting position for further processing.  Each image will require its own approach if I am going to make more effort on post processing but I will now be starting from a far cleaner place.  The samples above are comparison of approximately 100% crops with my original settings and the revised approach.  Hopefully you can see the difference.  It might be annoying to realize you have been missing something for so long but at least I finally worked it out!