Lightroom affecting image quality?

oO Stevie Oo

oO Stevie Oo

oO Stevie Oo

Associate
Joined
6 Nov 2010
Posts
887
Location
Behind the camera...
Howdy

I've noticed a few things times with lightroom (3.4) recently that pictures that start out crystal clear on the camera have noise on them or degraded quality after processing,
Could someone please advise what you can change in lightrooms develop interface without affecting picture quality or creating noise?
I very rarely adjust exposure and thought the rest are fine when shooting in RAW but I think I may have been wrong lol

Example below... that picture is crystal clear (@ the nose of the car which is what I was going for lol) and noise free on the camera but after processing, its lost some of the sharpness and gained some noise :/

Help please :(
Cheers


Drifting @ Teesside Autodrome 06.11.11 by Trackslide, on Flickr
 
Last edited:
Well on your camera it makes a lower res jpeg for previews that applies your camera setting which may be more contrast, higher sharpening, more noise reduction than the default import of RAW files in lightroom. Remember RAW files don't have any contrast/sharpness/noise reduction applied.

Ultimately you can never view critical sharpness on the camera, this you must try to ensure yourself but you may be able to detect obvious failures. What you can do is check exposure with the histograms (even this will require the UniWB trick to do accurately) and you can check composition, which you should have easily sorted at capture time through the viewfinder.

Hence the reviewing photos on the back LCD screen is not really that useful ultimately. I know people that will have their rear LCD almost always switched off, once you know your metering system's behavior and can apply exposure compensation by instinct you don't need the rear LCD so much.
 
Last edited:
D.P. said:
Remember RAW files don't have any contrast/sharpness/noise reduction applied..
Click to expand...

Doesn't lightroom add some by default? ACR does for me. I had a similar issue the Jpeg was clean and the raw when edited applied more noise than I was happy with. I was having to drag the luminance slider to 100 to get anywhere near the Jpeg. I cured this by exposing slightly more to the right. As soon as I was raising the exposure just a tad in ACR I would end up spending time trying to dial out the noise this would bring.

ACR applies sharpening by default but does not apply a mask, so every thing gets sharpened, noise etc. After taking advice I tend to apply a mask of around 30 now for people and work the noise sliders from there.
 
i wouldnt really rely on the camera screen as an indiction of noise, the screen just isnt big enough.

have you exported that out to flickr using the built in export preset by any chance? for some reason that doesnt use sRGB and you cant change it, i found that throws the quality out a bit on flickr.
 
Are you comparing a RAW file before import into Lightroom with one that's been imported? Or as others have said, is it simply just a comparison with the LCD preview on camera?

If it's the first it will likely be the default RAW processing that LR has done. I use Aperture personally, but I know that sets the default RAW processing based on what make and model of camera it is. I believe LR does the same, you can then of course tweak these settings before doing any real processing. I believe in Aperture you can also change the default RAW settings that are applied if you so wish.
 
It's just a simple case of a small 3" 640x480 screen displaying a large 5184x3456 image. :)

Why do camera makers baffle everyone with 'dots' and 'pixels' specs for the LCD monitor? Can't they use resolution like everyone else :p
 
did you have any joy with what i said about using the flickr plugin? looks like its still not an sRGB image.
 
Erm not quite sure what you mean bud,
I upload to flickr through lightroom if that's what you mean? Lol
I don't know any other way to get photos with processing out of lightroom :/
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom