At what point in the digital workflow is it best to do NR?
At what point in the digital workflow is it best to do NR?
Brendan,
In my opinion, near the end. I generally do levels first, then curves and dodging and burning, resampling if I plan to print larger, then sharpening and prepare final images (e.g. web and prints). I would do noise reduction just before or after sharpening, or both before and after.
Roger
Thanks guys, man it's great to get answers so quickly on BPN! I notice many seem to do NR in ACR - so they are probably going back to ACR after doing orther processing in PS I'm guessing. But doing it before sharpening makes plenty of sense.
- Brendan
I take a different approach. I remove noise early (and sharpen late). I figure if I don't want the noise, why carry it with me through image processing? Some processing steps may accentuate noise so if you reduce it beforehand, the effect will not be as big. I run some chroma noise reduction in ACR because this does not affect detail in the image. Soon after bringing the image into Ps I will assess for noise and if necessary deal with it then by masking off areas of the image in which I do not want to reduce noise (subject, other important image elements) then run Topaz Denoise. I have to say that since I've been using the 1DIV, I rarely need to do anything about noise.
Brendan, I do Chroma NR on the RAW file itself in DPP. Luminance NR, I do on the final resized jpg file. For bird shots, I usually do NR on BG and sharpening on the bird....so the order does not matter.
I do chroma and luma up front either in conversion or as soon as I get into PS. That way my master file has everything done to it and all I have to do is resize for different output options (i.e., print web, email, etc.)
Thanks again for your feedback on this everyone, very helpful.