Nikon D610 import quality grainy + Sierra Update

Yeah this has nothing to do with your operating system or Lightroom. This is actually very little noise for ISOs higher than 10000. You're probably shooting with auto-ISO enabled and you have way too high of a shutter speed and a far too high f-stop set for this scene and focal length. ISO 100, f/11 and 1/200s would be correct for a directly sunlit scene (sunny 16 rule) and you can probably overexpose a stop from that as your main subject is in the shade. So you get f/11 1/100s. Your f/22 1/2500s is 6 1/2 stops down from that, which forced your auto-ISO setting to go up by 6 1/2 stops to an ISO setting it would normally only have to do in the almost completely dark.

Auto-ISO is great and can help you not having to think about it too much while shooting but you should probably shoot in aperture or shutter priority mode using a reasonable f-stop (f/8 is probably fine for this) and shutter speed (1/100s is fine here at these wide focal lengths) instead of whatever mode you were using (manual probably).

TeekayAU wrote: For months I've been importing photos into LR and all of a sudden they've become horrible and grainy. My camera is new - full frame and the SD is a 16GB ultra and i shoot in RAW + JPG.

As pointed out by Per Berntsen  it appears the camera's ISO setting has been changed at some point from what you used previously to ISO 10,000. Are you aware of that?

At ISO 100 the same exposure would be about: F8 and 1/250, which is fine for most applications. In addition to excessive noise due to the ISO 10,000 setting the F22 aperture setting causes lens diffraction, which softens the image detail.

So what can you do to make these NEFs usable? The posted image with LR adjustments is over-sharpened and color saturation substantially raised, which accentuates the noise. Try using LR's default Sharpening settings (25, 1.0, 25, 0) with Luminance and Color Noise Reduction settings of 25 or higher. The Detail panel settings should be made at 1:1 Zoom View.  If you can upload this NEF file to Dropbox or other file sharing site we can provide more suggestions to provide better image rendering in LR.

No wonder the image is grainy, it was taken at ISO 10159. That's a very high ISO setting, which will produce a lot of noise.

Sharpening makes the image look even worse, because the noise is sharpened as well.

With a well lit scene like this you should use ISO 100 or 200, which will give you much better quality, and very little noise.

At ISO 100, the exposure would have been something like 1/250 second at f/8.

The high ISO probably forced you to stop down to f/22, which also affects quality in a bad way (diffraction).

Most lenses perform best in the f/8 - f/11 range.

What software are you using when you view the exported photo?

What are your export settings under File Sizing and Sharpening?

Can you clarify something? Are you saying the original is horrible? Which of the two photos is the original, it looks to me like the top one is the original but your words "This is an edited shot and the original pic" don't really make that clear at all.