Sharpen or denoise first?!

Bobster wrote in post #5938742
i expose to the right as much as possible, so i have little noise (even @ ISO1600)

OK, well, that would seem to work for you. For someone who doesn't always ETTR however, I'm not sure telling them to globally ignore noise reduction is particularly good advice. The ETTR technique is great when you have the time to set up your shot and guarantee that you're not clipping into white, but for those people that shoot a lot of action shots at high isos who maybe have to be a little bit more conservative with their exposures, noise is almost certainly going to be a problem they encounter on a fairly frequent basis. If you shoot almost exclusively landscapes or in the studio, then you can probably ETTR a lot more safely, but not everyone is able to do so all the time.

Any good sharpening tutorial can tell you why you leave sharpening until last. If you're being creative you can fit it where ever you like in your work flow.

Most of my stuff is a quick levels, curves, hue saturation and then sharpen for print. I use Grain Surgery for chroma if I want the image pristine but I find myself adding noise to many prints.

I've yet to see the noise at 100% on my monitor show any kind of distraction on paper. I'm over the hi def chrome Sorayama look.

I'm by no means a purist but I still want as much of the data original as I can get. I regularly pushed 200iso film to 1600 and got the results i was going for.

Noise ware programs are like p0rn, some people just can't keep their hands off it.

I guess this would depend on a) the amount of noise in the image and b) the size you are printing at, followed by c) whether or not your image lends itself to having noise in it.

Not everybody out there is over-smoothing their images with noise reduction....

Maybe you could point out where I said that. People are giving their opinions on what they use and how it works for them. If you don't like my opinion I'll give you double what you paid for it.

Well, that seemed to be what you were intimating in your comparison between NR and p0rn. It's no biggie.

Hrmm, I have no idea what that means but I guess I misrepresented myself in my previous post. I'm sorry that you seem to have picked up on some hostility from me. There was certainly none intended.

When I put a smiley at the end of a sentence it's meant as humour.
I didn't pick up on any hostility nor mean any in return. I just didn't get the response to something i didn't say in the first place. No harm, no foul. There's a lot of room for misinterpretation on a text only medium.

You'll typically find answers to this question to be all over the map but I tend to follow Ben Willmore's approach which says that noise removal/reduction should not be performed not first nor last, but "early."

By "early" he means AFTER you've done global color and tonal correction/adjustments and BEFORE localized editing steps that require selections and masks are performed.

The rationale for doing noise reduction after global color and tone adjustments is that in most cases noise, cannot be accurately evaluated and decisions made on how to remove it, until the tonal adjustments reveal how much noise is actually present in the image. For example, if you do NR first on an underexposed image, and then subsequently adjust exposure/brightness/co​ntrast you will no doubt reveal noise that couldn't be seen when NR was originally done.

Conversely, saving Noise Reduction for last, especially when using automatic selection tools and masks, means that the noise is likely to become embedded in the masks making it more difficult to remove than if NR was done before before masks and selections were done.

Obviously much of this reasoning is workflow-dependent. By that I mean advances in post-processing, like the ability in CS3 to edit both Raw and JPEG files in Adobe Camera RAW, means that you can entirely remove noise and perform capture sharpening even before the image file is brought into Photoshop proper. So if you tend to do your first editing steps in ACR, when NR is performed is not really an issue. But for users of older versions of Photoshop then it becomes more necessary to do NR at the most logical point; after tonal/contrast adjustments are made.

Then it becomes further complicated if you follow Bruce Fraser's sharpening workflow because then it becomes a concern that the capture sharpening round could tend to exaggerate the amount of noise present in an image.

Of course much of this turns also on how extensive your post-processing is normally. If you don't do masks and selections of specific image elements, or multiple rounds of sharpening, and limit your editing to maybe a few Levels and Curves adjustments then the point at which NR is done becomes less critical.

meady100 wrote in post #5903331
Hi all! This dilemma has been bugging me for ages; is there a definitive best practice in the application order of denoise (neatimage) and (smart) sharpen?! Very interested to hear answers!

Thanks,
Steve

I shoot mostly RAW and I generally apply some sharpening in LR early in my workflow, then second stage sharpening just before printing.

I sharpen last 99% of the time. Noise removal is only done when required and only as much as necessary. It's not necessary to remove ALL of the noise in a shot to achieve a good print.
Pixel peeping causes anxiety attacks.....

Irreverent wrote in post #5938854
..but for those people that shoot a lot of action shots at high isos who maybe have to be a little bit more conservative with their exposures, noise is almost certainly going to be a problem they encounter on a fairly frequent basis. If you shoot almost exclusively landscapes or in the studio, then you can probably ETTR a lot more safely, but not everyone is able to do so all the time.

i shoot alot of Music Gigs, so ISO1600/3200 is the only way with some venues having very poor lighting, and of course lighting is never constant, and i print my stuff @ 18x12/20x30" so..

How do you ETTR at a high ISO? You'd get better results by dropping from 3200 to 1600, or from 1600 to 800. Of course, if the available light precludes you from lowering the ISO any further, then you don't have enough light in order to properly ETTR either, so this all becomes moot.