Lightroom 3 is finally out after quite some time in beta and there are so many features which make it worth upgrading. To name a few; Speed, Vinguetting, Grain, Tethering and Noise Reduction. Today i’m going to focus on Noise Reduction. First, If you do not read Thomas Hawk’s blog yuou need to open a new browser tab and bookmark ThomasHawk.com. With that said, Thomas wrote a great article on how impressive the new Lightroom Noise Reduction is. He says it well that some unusable photos from the archives can now become usable thanks to the Noise Reduction tools. Yes it is that impressive..
Image from Adobe's Lightroom product page
So while it is really hard to see just how great the Noise Reduction tool is is from small photos I will share with you a sample. Don’t forget to check out Thomas Hawk’s sample as well.
Before Noise Reduction
Pay close attention to the noise on his face. That is where I was working off of.
After Noise Reduction
…and here is another which was taken at Generation Records in New York City. Meet Stephen Brodsky of the band Cave In. I had with me a Canon G9 which as you can tell had horrible noise problems even at 800 ISO. (This photo is at 1600 ISO)
Before Noise Reduction
Look closely at the t-shirts in the background
After Noise Reduction
The next sample is an old film scan from a project I was doing back when getting my Photography degree.
Before Noise Reduction
Check out the back wall in the photo
After Noise Reduction
There are two ways you can purchase Adobe Lightroom 3. There is a full purchase or an upgrade. If you’re upgrading you save a lot of money. I’d also like to point out that I don’t have many photos with crazy amounts of noise because I tend to shoot at the lowest ISO possible as much as I possibly can. So with that said I apologize for the lack of horribly noisy samples.
Thanks for reading and happy shooting,
Scott
Side note: Enjoy this video I captured during Stephen Brodsky’s show
This is on my old YouTube account which I don’t use anymore. Subscribe to my new YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/scottwyden. Hopefully one day Google will allow old accounts to merge with new ones.
About Scott Wyden Kivowitz
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