With all due respect, Professor Boyd, your argument is not at all compelling. It seems that you are taking the 'thinking outside the box' (TOTB) metaphor much more.

It’s inevitable when you’re making digital photographs that you are going to encounter digital noise. Noise in an image is the result of variability in the light level readings from one sensor pixel to the next. Even the best quality sensors will produce some level of noise, and the noise will be amplified under certain conditions. Fortunately, with Lightroom, we have built-in noise reduction capability, and the performance is exceptionally good. In general, the two most likely circumstances that will produce noise in your images are: • High ISO settings • Long exposures Both of these factors tend to come into play most often in low light photography.

What does the noise look like? It has two distinct and different forms, and each can be addressed individually. The two types of noise that you’ll encounter in your image are luminance noise, and color noise. Luminance noise tends to resemble grain, but may be overpowering depending on the image and the settings. Color noise, on the other hand, tends to take on the form of magenta and green splotches in the image, especially in the shadows of an image. Here’s an example of both types of noise: These types of noise can occur in other situations, as well.

In the case of the image below, I photographed this lovely Rose of Sharon flower in the rain – but I had just been photographing indoors under low natural light, and my ISO was set to 3200 – and I forgot to change it back. The image doesn’t look too bad at this size: However, if we look more closely, we can see a high level of noise. Here is the same image zoomed to 100%: We can take care of this with Lightroom, and relatively quickly. In the Develop module, we can open the Detail section, and here is where we find sharpening and noise reduction. We’re going to focus on noise reduction in this tutorial.

In order to see the results of noise reduction and sharpening, we want to view our image at 100%, Anything less, and we won’t see the effect. As we can see, there is already some color noise reduction being applied in this image (the default value in Lightroom is 25%). If we set the color noise reduction to 0, we can see the full extent of noise in this image.

We have a lot of color noise, as evidenced by the magenta and green splotches, in addition to the luminance noise. In this image, I’ve zoomed to 3:1 (300%) so that you can really see the color noise: Lightroom by default applies a color noise reduction of 25, and this is often enough to remove the typical color noise that you’ll find in your images. Noise reduction will soften the image, though, so we may not always want this default.

You’ll need to experiment with your own images to see what works. For this image, we can use a value of 15%, and that works well. But what about the luminance noise?

We can adjust the luminance noise reduction to compensate for this type of noise. Just drag the slider while viewing the image, and we can see a remarkable difference as the value is increased. Again, remember that you must view the image at least at 100% to see this effect. We’re at 300%, but here it is at 100% as well: Notice as we increase the noise reduction, the image details are slightly blurred. This is a side effect of noise reduction, and we have an ongoing tradeoff between sharpness and noise as we develop our images.

We can restore some of the sharpness by increasing the sharpness setting, but pushing it too far will end up sharpening the noise. There are a couple of settings under luminance noise that can help us a bit, though. The first is Detail, and you can think of this as a “threshold” slider. Adjust it all the way to the left, and all detail is treated as noise, and softened. All the way to the right, and only larger details are considered noise. The default of 50 works well in most cases, but you’re free to experiment with it. The second setting is often more useful – Contrast.

This setting can be used to introduce a little extra edge contrast that may have been lost in the softening effect of the noise reduction. Again experimentation is key, and no two images are likely to behave exactly the same way. Keep in mind, as with sharpening, adding more contrast can bring back some of the noise you’re trying to reduce. Color noise reduction has some settings, as well. The first slider is detail.

This is a threshold adjustment similar to the one for luminance noise. Turning this one all the way up tries to maintain some color detail, and we might end up with some color artifacts remaining. Here is a view at 300% to show the effect: The other control for color noise reduction is new in Lightroom 5, and it is color smoothing.

This control can help with any remaining color artifacts, by smoothing the low frequency color aberrations. By default it is set to 50%, but feel free to push it if you have some stubborn color noise splotches, and see if it doesn’t help minimize them further. At the end of the day, noise reduction is a judgment call.

It’s up to you, and the amount of noise you remove or keep will define your style. Keep in mind that when you print, some noise will be softened in the printing process as well – so don’t be afraid to leave some noise present. Finally, I’ll leave you with a comparison of Lightroom with some of the more popular noise reduction dedicated solutions. I’ve found that Lightroom can hold its own pretty well, and I’m rarely driven to make much use of the dedicated solutions for my raw conversions. Here’s the final image from Lightroom 5: Here is the same image noise reduced in Google’s Nik Dfine 2: And here it is with Topaz DeNoise 5: Here is the finished image with Imagenomic Noiseware 5: As you can see here, Lightroom does as well as any of the third party dedicated solutions, at least with this image.

As a disclaimer, I’m not an expert with DFine, so I may not have been able to coax the best results from that software. For the others, I saw subtle differences, but I thought Lightroom’s results were as good, and didn’t require a separate editing session to implement. Mike has been a photographer, artist, educator, and technophile for most of his life. Early in his career, he created technical illustrations and photographs for electronic equipment manufacturers, and taught classes in computer aided drafting and 3D modeling software.

When digital cameras became widely available in the late 1990s, the move was a natural one, and has led to a happy combination of technology, software, photography and art. Mike is an Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop and Acrobat, and is well versed in Lightroom and Photoshop Elements, as well as Illustrator and InDesign.

He has also contributed his time and efforts to the excellent work being done by Operation Photo Rescue, in restoring photographs damaged by natural disasters. As an active member of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, he continues his quest for excellence in art, excellence in design, and excellence in education. I am confused about how big I should zoom when doing the sharpening/noise reduction. I used to zoom in really strongly but then when I zoomed out, I had taken away too much noise and the pictures always looked flat. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing for a long time.

So, in a sense, don’t we have to be careful not to zoom in too much when doing this? Doesn’t it depend on how big the pictures will be printed? If they will be printed as 8×10 or smaller, don’t we have to make sure we zoom out to make sure it just looks as good as we need it in the biggest form it will be printed?

As there were many alternative features in Adobe Photoshop CS5, like Pixel Bender, Colored Pencil, Dry Brush and many other artistic filters, there is now the Oil Paint filter in CS6. I will be showing this feature on a squirrel’s portrait. The filter will give the photo a very professional artistic effect if you follow the instructions below. While the Pixel Bender is a filter in Photoshop CS5, but the Oil Paint one will definitely be more valuable for the user. It works especially well on animal, plant and other nature images.

But the Pixel Bender is quite a hassle compared to the new Oil filter. You can compare these two by having a look on the screenshot below. First, let’s talk about the Stylization option. On the left is the older version that specifies the wavy effects of an image. Download Driver Creative Ct5880 Windows Xp. It takes the gravelly effect to wavy one.

Though gravelly effect inspires lots of designers, I do prefer the swirly one because of its nice natural look. Next comes Cleanliness that is on the contrary to Stylization and takes out its intensive contrast.

If you don’t use it much, you will not get that interesting wavy effect. On the other hand, adding it to the top will cause the intensive pattern and that of course is everyone’s own choice how hard to go. Scale and Bristle Detail more or less affect how stressed the Stylization and Cleanliness buttons are. So if in need to get these options more intensive on the photo, definitely use Scale and Bristle Detail functions. Now, the Angular Direction will change the sight of pattern by moving the slider.

Best way to understand its function is to try it out. Lastly the Shine slider that will light up the big picture, and also increases the wavy or gravelly effect. Now if you look at the three examples below, left one has Stylization and Cleanliness quite low but some Shine, the middle one has the two sliders full and a little bit of Shine, and the right box has them also fully high but no Shine at all. So you can understand how the sliders affect your image. Shine leaves a pattern into the image even if added very slightly as seen in the middle part above.

But without any Shine, it will be a bit artistic like the pic on the right. Dark Heresy Adeptus Astartes Pdf Writer. So it is recommended not to use Shine at all.

After using this Oil Paint filter, you can adjust and retouch your photo using several other Photoshop features as you might be used to. For example, various filters can be used to smooth up the whole work, and give details some more retouch.

Below is the example of before and after using the Oil Paint filter in CS6.