Sharpness and Noise Reduction in LR

[BobaPhil]

I'm just after some tips or advice about the Sharpness and Noise Reductions in LR.

In this pic :



You can, just about, see the image and it's far too noisy. Now, I understand the 'amount' of sharpness (I think), but could I get a clearer understanding of : radius, detail and masking? What settings should I be looking for? Is there a 'rule of thumb' with the numbers?

Thanks peeps.

 

[jaomul]

There are no strict rules but youtube has lots of tips

 

[ronlane]

On NR, I typically only go to about 40 on both luminance and color. I don't mess with the other sliders in that section. In sharpening, I typically use 68, but I am going to have to watch the above video and try it out.

 

[BobaPhil]

I did mean to look on YouTube, but need some time to 'take it in', but thanks, I'll have a look see.

 

[hirejn]

The settings depend on the camera, file and personal taste. You generally don't want the radius over 1.2 or detail over 10-25. The amount is highly subjective but you'll generally need about 50 to see a significant difference. Luminance depends on the ISO and at low ISOs I leave it at 0 or maybe 5. At high ISOs I go to 20+. Color noise stays at 25 for all images unless I see a need to refine it. These settings are more for RAW as JPEGs are already processed in the camera. RAW contains no sharpening out of camera. Experiment and once you find good general settings for a given ISO and camera, you can then make it a preset that you can apply in batch, which gives you a good quick starting point.

The masking is an advanced tool that controls which areas of the image are sharpened and which are not. The higher you make the mask, the less will be sharpened, but it goes by areas of detail. If you drag the mask right, areas with less detail, like plain skies, will be left out of the sharpening, and that's normally good since plain skies have no detail. If you leave the mask at 0, the sharpening settings will be applied to the entire image.

 

[fazapan]

I rarely go far more than 40 on both luminance and color as it may result in blur or color bleeding. I think , the detail in shaping may works like threshold in photoshop, and the detail in noise reduction may works like blur radius, so when the image is too noisy, I would like use low detail instead of high reduction amout.