essential skills: digital photography in available light
Noise reduction and sharpening - Step 3
Set the image to 100% and click on the Detail tab to access the sharpness and noise reduction
controls. The Luminance Smoothing and Color Noise Reduction sliders (designed to tackle the
camera noise that occurs when the image sensors’ ISO is high) should only be raised from 0 if you
notice image artifacts such as noise appearing in the image window.In the image above the sensor was set to 400 ISO on a budget DSLR. Both luminance noise (left)
and color noise (right) are evident when the image is set to 100%. With more expensive DSLR
cameras set to 100 ISO it is common to leave all three sliders set to 0.
It is recommended that you only perform a gentle amount of sharpening in the RAW dialog box
(less than 25) if you are using Photoshop Elements (see the chapter ‘Post-production Editing’).
Sharpening only affects the image preview as viewed in Bridge and not the image opened in the
editing space when using the default settings of the full version of Photoshop.Warning > The Luminance Smoothing and Color Noise Reduction sliders can remove subtle
detail and color information that may go unnoticed if the photographer is not careful to pay
attention to the effects of these sliders. Zoom in to take a closer look, and unless you can see
either the little white speckles or the color artifacts set these sliders to 0.