Lightroom 3.0 Noise Reduction.

First shot is the raw file taken out of the K-7, cropped ever so slightly and then resized. Second is the same shot, cropped the same, processed through Lightroom 3.0 with noise reduction turned up to full on everything, sharpened a little and then resized for Flickr.

Camera: PENTAX K-7
Lens: Sigma MKI 70-200mm APO EX f2.8
Exposure: 0.017 sec (1/60)
Aperture: f/8.0
Focal Length: 160 mm
ISO Speed: 6400

Original




Processed in Lightroom 3.0




I am rather impressed to be honest.

Excellent result, now feel even better as you drink the wine...

What - all in one sitting by himself ??

That's very impressive, only the red label looks to
have suffered from the NR. Who would have thought the
2nd pic was at 6400ISO

Looks v impressive. I currently use Topaz Denoise 4, which works well but takes quite a while to process each image (around 1 minute). How fast is the new Lightroom at doing the noise processing? I'm tempted to consider moving on from PSE to Lightroom because you read so many glowing reports....

I have Topaz Denoise 4 as a plugin for Elements 7 and as you say it takes what seems forever to do even light processing. Lightroom does it instantly.

would be interesting to see the same again with different levels of noise reduction.
see its not bad at all mike.

Thanks Mike. I use open source/Linux platform NR solutions. Your demo has inspired me to do a compare and contrast for them. I'll post if it produces anything halfway useful.

C

I also have those two.
Lightroom 3 is indeed impressive and fast but I find the results off topaz 4 still better, it retains more fine details with the right settings but it's indeed very slow

Did you try the highest noise reduction settings in ACR as well? Would be interested how they compare.

I've always suspected that the alleged 'poor' performance of the k7 was mainly to do with the jpeg processor in the camera. In RAW there seems to be more of a level playing field, and the RAW noise graph of the K-7 on DPR's review looks about the same as the D300s.

Another example if I may Mike.

Taken at a street theatre in Murcia a couple of nights go.

K20D + DA* 50-135mm 1/125th, f2.8, ISO3200, available lighting only - no flash.

Original (no processing or cropping except to add copyright)




The result

ACR and lightroom are using the same codes as far as I know, so you won't see any difference if that's the case.

I've just started using Imagenomics Noiseware which is very fast on my Intel Core i7 920 rig (a couple of seconds for a full-size PEF opened in PSE using ACR) and gives brilliant results, IMHO, even at the default settings. To be fair, though, I haven't yet tried it with files shot at the extreme ISO settings that some of you have. Costs about the same as Topaz 4: I paid £65.00 for the stand-alone Pro package and PS/PSE plug-in. More details here : http://www.imagenomic.com/nwpg.aspx

Trial downloads are available but your processed image is left with a grid overlay to prevent printing. There is free 'community' version that is limited to saving files as jpgs at medium-to-good settings only.

Would love to see what it could do with your capture of the street performer, Peter. Any chance of you e-mailing a copy (reduced) for me to try it on? I could then return it or post it for you to comment on.

Jon

Jon, you have a PM.

Peter,

Here is my risible attempt to reproduce your image Removing the noise was a doddle, taking just a few seconds using one of the presets (I'm not sufficently familiar with the whole process yet to go 'manual'). I then spent more hours than I'm prepared to admit trying to reproduce the lighting/colour of the original using PSE before I just had accept defeat Compared with yours, my edit looks flat and lifeless and I now realise that, contrary to what I had begun to believe, my photo-manipulations skills remain essentially non-existant

If you can steel yourself sufficiently to study my version in detail, please let me know what you think of the noise reduction acheived using Noiseware.

Many thanks for letting me 'play'.

Regards,

Jon