Nick Miners Photography

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Adobe finally released Light­room 3 today, after an extens­ive beta test­ing period dur­ing which we were shown tan­tal­ising glimpses of the new fea­tures. How­ever, by far the most impress­ive of the added good­ies is the improved noise reduc­tion. I’ve included some examples below.

This photo was taken at ISO 3200 on my Canon EOS 5D Mark II, shortly after I bought it, as part of a series of pho­tos of Bor­ough Mar­ket in Lon­don. All the pho­tos in the set were taken at the same ISO, which allowed me to cap­ture much of the activ­ity and goods on sale without hav­ing to use flash.

Here is a 100% crop of the same shot with no noise reduc­tion applied (all sliders set to zero); for ISO 3200 it’s pretty good, show­ing off the low-​​light cap­ab­il­it­ies the 5DII is fam­ous for.

After apply­ing noise reduc­tion, the chroma noise has all but van­ished, and only a hint of lumin­ance noise remains, with (in my opin­ion) sug­ges­tions of film grain.

The full photo, after noise reduc­tion has been applied. It’s hard to tell the dif­fer­ence at this size, so here’s an example of an ISO 6400 shot that has been adjus­ted with Light­room 3:

The chroma noise, even at this smal­ler size, is obvi­ous, espe­cially in the cloud and on the right-​​hand illu­min­ated tree at the bot­tom of the picture.

The dif­fer­ence here is plain. A huge improve­ment over the original.

I now feel I can more con­fid­ently use ISO 6400 more on my cam­era now; tech­nic­ally it does go up to ISO 25,600 but I would have to try that out in Light­room before decid­ing whether it’s a real­istic option.

Tags: 5d mark 2, Adobe, Canon, Lightroom, London, noise reduction