What: After making a selection by luminance range, allow the user to expand or contract the selection by (number of pixels).
Why: After AI Denoise of high-ISO files, deep shadow areas retain residual noise which limits the extent to which they can be adjusted.
Value: In dance photography, I'm often faced with pathological lighting conditions (e.g., some dancers in a bright spotlight while other dancers are in shadow.) Creating good-looking images from such exposures typically requires boosting the shadows significantly, which then necessitates doing extra noise reduction in the shadow areas.
My current solution involves applying extra NR via shape-based masking (e.g. AI people recognition, manual brush selection, etc.) This approach works but takes much more time than I'd like to spend.
I'd like to make this process go much faster by using luminance-range-based selection to grab only the shadow regions -- but as currently implemented in LR, this doesn't work. It doesn't work because in such images, boosting the shadows results in residual noise appearing as discrete tiny areas of brightness against a dark background. Applying a luminance mask to such regions selects the dark background but fails to include the noise in the selection.
Illustration 1 shows an image file created by applying AI Denoise to a .CR3 RAW file, before any other adjustments are made. The callout box at the bottom is a 100% view of the background, and appears noise-free.
Illustration 2 shows the same image after Clarity was increased to 50. In addition to the 100% view of the background, this illustration also includes a 100% view of a luminance mask intended to select the shadow regions. The isolated noise spots are not selected, and thus this mask is not suitable for applying noise reduction in the shadow areas. (I've found no way to create a luminance mask which includes the undesired shadow noise without also including desired mid-tones in the non-shadow regions.)
In Photoshop, this limitation can be addressed by applying expanding the spotty selection by a few pixels. This results in the selection engulfing the noise spots without expanding the overall selection significantly.
Having the ability to expand/contract mask selections in LR would be a great time-saver for my work.
1
Reply
AdChoices
