Sharpening & Noise Reducation in workflow...

[adam_nance]

As a followup to Stacey's very helpful thread on sharpening below...

 

When in your workflow do you sharpen and when do you run noise

reduction?

 

I've got a bundle of photos from an indoor wedding taken at 1600

(back of church/no flash rules) that need both sharpening and noise

reduction as well as some minor color adjustments.

 

Is there a standard workflow here that works better than others?

Color first, then sharpen, then run noise reduction?

 

What's your preferred noise reduction method? I've got neatimage at

home now on trial and it seems great. Another name I've seen thrown

around is noiseninja. What's your favorite?

 

Thanks a lot!

 

-Adam

[adam_nance]

Oh man! Nothing is worse than proofreading your post only to find "reducation" in your subject line!

 

It's a good thing that I photograph weddings rather than transcribe them...

 

-Adam

[al_kaplan1]

Better to screw up here amongst friends than screw up on a job. It's happened to all of us.

[lb-]

raw or jpeg?

[adam_nance]

Jpegs. Don't have the CF memory to shoot all RAW yet, but we're getting there.

 

Thanks, Al. :)

 

-Adam

[prinosphotography]

I sometimes use a very moderate amount of sharpening towards the beginning of the

workflow, but final sharpening is the last thing I do for print (and always after resizing to

the final print size). I use a either fred miranda's CS Pro plugin or straight USM.

CS Pro can be batched, and you can USM as part of an action that is batched as well. The

latest version of Dr. Brown's Image processor (www.russellbrown.com) let's you specify

USM as part of a batch resizing also. <br><br>

 

If you think an image needs noise reduction, I would do that as the very first step. I have

found that noise reduction tools (I use Noise Ninja, but have tried others) seem best with

an unmodified out-of-

camera image. I think (but cannot prove) anything you do later, curves, sharpening, etc

might cause the profiled noise reduction analysis to not work as well. Just my opinion,

YMMV.

[frank_skomial]

Adam,

You need to obtain Neat Image PRO version software that allows batch processing of all files in a directory. (non-PRO allows 1 file at a time only). Optionally also download noise profile for Nikon D70 camera, and select that camera noise profile from within Neat Image program manu, or let the Neat Image select best noise profile - as is also works miracles. Then select that directory of (e.g. 500 files taken at ISO 1600) and start the conversion. Depending on your computer speed and file sizes it will take from 2 to 8 hours. I usually do this overnight.

 

You will be amazed how noise clean your photos will be. This will be your first step to success, since D70 ISO 1600 noise in more or less consistent, and easy to remove.

 

I usually perform sharpening in Photo Shop, but that varies more from picture to picture, and you may need to work pictures individually, watching amount of sharpness that is best for each picture.

 

Good Luck!

[steve_hovland]

I prefer to use more light rather than noise reduction.

 

My processing flow is: crop, levels, sharpen.