Snydremark wrote in post #17643934
Overall, this pretty much covers my workflow with the 7D files as well; the one change that I made to the "follow LR's flow down the Develop panel is that I go and do both color and standard NR BEFORE I do the sharpening step. I have found that doing sharpening first enhances existing noise so much that I run into the killing of the fine detail as mentioned above; whereas, by doing NR first I can apply a bit more aggressive sharpening to get the edge detail back out of fine bits (like feathers and hair). I normally base my sharpening strength on the ISO that I'm working with. 100 - 400, I will keep it right in the 20-40 range, but as I go up I'll go stronger. 640-1600 I'll usually get into the 50-70 range and above 1600 may get as high as 75.
Also, early on in the flow, be very VERY judicious in the use of the Clarity slider, as being too aggressive with it (15+ in most instances; I try to keep between 0 and 12 in nearly all cases) will further accentuate noise/add additional artifacts that can further kill detail and such when doing your NR/Sharpening routine later on.
An additional note on the color NR stage; only adjust this until the color patches you're noticing go away; anything beyond that is simply destroying detail and isn't helping anything.
Overall, this pretty much covers my workflow with the 7D files as well; the one change that I made to the "follow LR's flow down the Develop panel is that I go and do both color and standard NR BEFORE I do the sharpening step. I have found that doing sharpening first enhances existing noise so much that I run into the killing of the fine detail as mentioned above; whereas, by doing NR first I can apply a bit more aggressive sharpening to get the edge detail back out of fine bits (like feathers and hair). I normally base my sharpening strength on the ISO that I'm working with. 100 - 400, I will keep it right in the 20-40 range, but as I go up I'll go stronger. 640-1600 I'll usually get into the 50-70 range and above 1600 may get as high as 75.
Also, early on in the flow, be very VERY judicious in the use of the Clarity slider, as being too aggressive with it (15+ in most instances; I try to keep between 0 and 12 in nearly all cases) will further accentuate noise/add additional artifacts that can further kill detail and such when doing your NR/Sharpening routine later on.
An additional note on the color NR stage; only adjust this until the color patches you're noticing go away; anything beyond that is simply destroying detail and isn't helping anything.
One comment. Lightroom does not care which order you do things in. No matter the order, same settings yields the same results. But, I agree with you, some photos are easier to process by mixing up the operations a bit.
I agree that Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation are best used sparingly. I rarely go past 5 on Saturation.
