Light room 4.4 Noise removal by adjustment brush

If you use the adjustment brush with the mask tool and select the Flow of 100 and Density of 100, then move the noise slider to 100, will that remove all noise from the masked area?

P.

I don't know. What happened when you tried it?

Dan Marchant wrote in post #17809751
I don't know. What happened when you tried it?

I assumed it would have removed all visible noise at the max 100 setting, but even with 2 passes at the same level noise was still visible.

P.

To explain an example - I got a good sharp pic of a Swallow Hawk in flight the exposure of it was about average(it could have been slightly lighter but not a lot) it was a against a clear blue sky, there was lots of detail in the feathers that I did not want affected, so I decided the best action would be to use the brush mask tool and to apply the mask around the bird, and just loose the noise in the sky, I did this twice as I said above but noise was still present and not completely clean.

P.

You could try it backwards.

Remove the noise the regular way then make an adjustment to the area you don't want noise filtered from and set to -100.

Then if that is not enough do an adjustment on the sky and try to lower clarity and sharpness as well as adding more noise reduction.

Nogo wrote in post #17809833
You could try it backwards.

Remove the noise the regular way then make an adjustment to the area you don't want noise filtered from and set to -100.

Then if that is not enough do an adjustment on the sky and try to lower clarity and sharpness as well as adding more noise reduction.

That's interesting - when I just applied it to the sky I never altered the clarity or sharpness sliders only the noise, also I did the normal noise and sharpening at the default levels in LR4 and used the USM mask at about 30 but set sharpening to about 70.

Perhaps what I could try also is to do the brush mask first then do the USM mask and add sharpening last?

P.

I think it worked - I used the mask brush tool first after the initial adjustments to exposure size etc, but this time I reduced clarity to - 40 and sharpness -40 and then noise to +100, after doing that and pressing done I then went into my USM sharpness settings set the mask till no noise speckles showed in the Alt/right key mode - while checking this against varying amounts of sharpening till I got to a mask of 40 and sharpening of 75 while retaining a clear sky.

So my lesson learned - do the mask/brush adjustment including negative amounts of clarity and sharpening along with max positive noise control first, then do the normal USM sharpening last.

Here is the result quite good I think

P.

Looks good. You were probably creating noise by sharpening that much in the first attempt.

Looks good.
Some things to keep in mind:
Local adjustments are not straight forward and as simple as they might seem. Probably only the designers and a few insiders like Victoria Bampton understand all its ins and outs. However, many of the controls do not give absolute values, but rather percentage increases or decreases of already set parameters in the global control panels. For instance, if you set sharpening in the Detail panel to 40 and then brush in +50 sharpening, in the brushed area you have 60, not 90. But if the Detail setting is 0, the brushed area is also still 0 (50% of 0 = 0). NR works much the same way, but it only changes luma NR, not color NR.

Other brush settings are different; minus Saturation, for instance, reduces saturation until at -100 the brushed area is entirely desaturated, but positive Saturation increases vibrance, so more effect on blues, cyans and greens than on reds and oranges. Minus Clarity proportionately reduces the global clarity setting when set at -1 to -50, but from -50 to -100 adds some active blurring.