Neat Video & Neat Image community

I remain a little confused about sharpening/noise reduction when using NI in conjunction with Lightroom CC.

My workflow is as follows.

Transfer files from camera using NX2
Import into Lightroom CC
Apply adjustments for exposure/contrast/etc in LR
Save as TIFF and then open in NI for denoising and sharpening.
Save as JPG.

My understanding is that RAW files are unaffected by any in-camera sharpening however Lightroom has sharpening and noise reduction capabilities. Should I set bot of these to zero and let NI perform the job on its own?

This depends on the visual results you are getting from LR sharpening and noise reduction and from NI. I recommend to directly visually compare their results and decide which one look better in your tasks. You can even combine them in some way. However I do not recommend to apply any sharpening before noise reduction, because that would make the task of the noise filter more difficult. If you use NI noise reduction and sharpening, you can be sure that NI noise reduction is done before NI sharpening. But if you also apply LR sharpening before NI, then that could make the job of NI noise reduction more difficult.

Vlad

Thanks for the clarification Vlad.

I have now reset my LR defaults to no Sharpening or Noise Reduction and I am finding in more than a few cases that NI's Auto Profiling gives a better result for colour noise reduction than the camera-specific profile, especially at higher ISO (e.g. 3200).

Further to my previous post, I had a couple of images that I could not eliminate colour noise from completely in NI so managed to remove just that offending noise in LR then very successfully finished off in NI - very happy with the outcome, particularly for higher ISO shots.

Thanks Vlad

Perhaps NI needed to some adjustments in the filter settings (like increasing the noise levels and/or noise reduction amounts). Also, building a good noise profile is very important in such a case.

Anyway, I am glad you could solve the problem by combining two tools.

Vlad