Camera Raw: How To Effectively Sharpen & Reduce Noise
https://www.shutterbuggs.com/ - In this video, we’re going to take a look at Photoshop raw sharpening and noise removal adjustments in Camera Raw, which are two settings that some people have a lot of trouble with, but I hope to sort of simplify them for you in this video. So to begin with, let’s go up to the Panels Options at the top here, and you’ll notice two little triangles. So this is a Detail Panel, and if you click on that, you’ll notice you have Sharpening and Noise Reduction options available to you. And you’ll also have this little warning here that says if you want a more accurate preview of your sharpening to zoom in at 100%, which is entirely accurate. So to begin with, before we start playing around with any settings, let’s zoom in to 100% on our image.
And as you can see to start off with, there is a fair bit of color noise there in my image, because it is quite a colorful image, and it is reasonably in focus, I should say, from my original shot. Now when sharpening, you have the amount, radius, detail, and masking values. Now the amount is simply the amount of sharpening that you want to apply to your image. So as you increase that, the sharpening increases to your image, and it can look quite hideous once you get to about 150. When making adjustments to sharpening, you have some really neat ways of viewing sharpening now that just weren’t available in Camera Raw previously.
If you were to hold down the Alt Key on a PC or the Option Key on a Mac, you’d notice now when you click on Amount, you can view just your luminance or detail from your photograph without any color information. Now this is really good because it allows you to be able to make more accurate sharpening adjustments without being affected by the colors that are in your images. Because sometimes that can distract you and put you off how much sharpening you actually want to apply to your image. Now you can also hold down the Alt or Option key for the radius, and this will actually show you the radius of the sharpening that’s being applied to your image.
So as you increase it, the radius increases and it increases in your actual preview, which is quite neat, and that only goes up to 3.0. Now in most cases, I like to keep that around, in Camera Raw specifically, I like to keep that at one, just because I think it gives it a more natural appearance when sharpening. Now you also have the detail settings. This is the amount of detail that you want to preserve when you’re actually making your sharpening adjustment. So with this, you can also hold down your Alt or Option key, and it will show you the areas that it’s going to retain. As you increase that, you’ll notice that your detail in the sharpening increases. So you really want to keep that around 25% if you can. I probably wouldn’t recommend going too far over, but it also depends on what you’ve actually shot your image at in terms of ISO.
So if you shot at a really high ISO, you can have a really noisy and grainy image. So you want to sort of take that into account. But if you shot at 100, then you can probably increase the amount of detail in your image accordingly. On any detail we have masking. Now this is a feature of sharpening that I love, because it allows you to exclude sharpening from areas of your image. And the way it works is it creates a mask similar to a layer mask in Photoshop, but excludes where the actual sharpening is applied. Now the easiest way to see how this is actually implemented is by holding down your Alt key on a PC or Option key on your Mac while you’re actually making adjustments to the slider.
So as you can see here, now we’ve got a white screen. Now as I start to increase the value, you start to see some grays, dark grays, and blacks come into the shot. Now these are the areas that are actually going to be excluded from sharpening. Now if you start off with value 0, you’re going to go from sort of the shadows and as you increase it right the way to 100, you’re actually into the highlights. So the areas in white are the areas that are getting sharpening applied to. The areas in black are being excluded. So it’s extremely useful if you ISO the image, and you’ve got a lot noise in the shadows, and you don’t want to apply additional sharpening to the shadows and emphasize that noise.
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