Free Photoshop Tutorials: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 - Noise filter vs noise filter

1. A noisy image
One of the enhanced features in Lightroom 3 is noise filtering, which has been pretty nicely reworked.

We'll compare the filter in version 3.0 to the same feature in 2.7.

You'll need a noisy photo for this purpose. The above image is part of a photo taken with ISO1250 sensitivity in half-shadow.

2. A base for comparison
Before we begin, let's take a small detour and see how Photoshop, king of image editors, deals with the same noise.

We used the built-in noise filter on 70%, and since it blurred the photo quite much, we also applied some detail enhancing. You shouldn't overuse the latter with high values as it tends to bring noise back.

3. Lightroom 2.7
Now let's see those Lightroom versions. Earlier versions up to 2.7 contain noise filtering under Detail, along with sharpening and color defect removal. There are two sliders, reducing Luminance and Color noise, respectively.

4. Filtered (Lr 2.7)
We set Luminance to 70% here as well, and left Color at the factory default, 25%.

The result is better than what we got in Photoshop. More noise eliminated, more details kept, but still it could be better.

5. Lightroom 3.0
You can find the filtering feature in the new Lightroom version at the same location (under Detail), but now it offers 5 settings instead of 2. The Luminance and Color sliders still control basic noise filtering intensity. However, both have a Detail slider now, which allow reclaiming some of the details blurred by filtering. The Luminance section also sports a Contrast setting for enhancing detail contrast in darker areas.

Of course, be cautious when increasing Detail and Contrast as well since they can reintroduce noise or unnatural fragmenting to the picture.

6. Filtered (Lr 3.0)
Again, we set Luminance to 70% and left Color at the factory default of 25%. Both Detail slider were set to 50% by default. We increased Luminance Detail to 80% and Color Detail to 70% to reclaim more of the details. We can increase them more freely than in Photoshop as such high values still don't bring back much of the noise.

Finally, we set Contrast to 70%. This is pretty much optional as it doesn't always have a visible effect on the picture.

The result is still not perfect, but that isn't something we would expect anyway. However, the picture contains less noise than the above ones, and even finer details can be seen.