How to PROPERLY Sharpen & Reduce Noise in LIGHTROOM

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
This is good, but what I'd started doing with the advent of the texture slider is to use the brush tool to apply negative texture in areas with more noise, sometimes along with some of the the noise reduction slider available there, to apply various amounts of reduction in different areas of the image. I get a lot of bird shots coming in at ISO 4000 and the noise isn't as visible in the focused areas as it is in the backgrounds, so being able to selectively apply it allows me to better preserve details in the subject.

That said, in the last month I've switched almost entirely to using Topaz Denoise AI and Adjust AI to denoise and sharpen my photos. There is a sharpen tool within denoise as well. The "AI" portion works well in identifying the areas that most need noise reduced while ignoring those that don't. One hint, turn off the auto preview function in Denoise or you'll be waiting for it to rerender you preview far more than you'd like (it's not the fastest piece of software, but it's significantly less resource intensive than their Sharpen AI tool which does a remarkable job at "refocusing" OOF or slightly blurred images.
 
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