 I'm in the mood for life simply because you're near me. Do love birds so damn cute? Alright, I don't know about you but I'm pretty excited to work on a photo with these two little guys. What we're going to do is talk about noise reduction. And there's a couple of ways that we can tackle noise reduction. We could do it right here inside of Lightroom under the details panel or we could extend on some of the things that we've been doing with the Nik Collection free plugin Lightroom and Photoshop plugin because they too have noise reduction software. And it really just depends on the photograph and the results I'm getting, whether I like to do it inside of Lightroom or use the Define. But I will say that 9 times out of 10, I find myself going directly to the Define feature just because it's so easy. It works really, really well at preserving the detail even after it's reduced the noise. And with that said, I want to just touch on one thing before we jump into that software. When it comes to noise reduction, basically in a nutshell what we're doing is blurring the photograph or blurring the pixels in the photograph in order to reduce some of the noise. And so the trick or the art to reducing noise in a photograph is get rid of the noise but preserve the detail. And sometimes that's a little bit easier said than done. But I do find that this Nik software or this Nik plugin works pretty outstanding. So I'm going to show it to you. You won't believe how easy it is and hopefully you'll find yourself using it. So let's jump into Lightroom and show you exactly what it is I'm talking about. So here we are looking at these two little fine, lovey-dovey fellow foxes. I like you a lot. And if I click on this photograph to just zoom in here so you can kind of get a better sense as to what's going on, clearly you can see that there's some grain in the background here. And even if I look at my camera settings, I was only at an ISO at about 500. So this could be due to that ISO. It could also be due to light particles in the air. And when you have a shallow depth of field that light particles could be getting picked up in the image. It's up to you how much of this noise you want to take out. Some people actually introduce or add noise to their photograph because they like the texture. It sort of reminds them of their days when they worked inside a film. But that's not something that I like. And most people that you talk to today that work in the digital realm like to clean the image and have something as clean and precise as possible. So what we want to do is go in and reduce this noise. Now like I said, you could go into the details section here and look at the noise reduction and kind of work with that. But I'm not going to do any of that in this tutorial. We're just going to jump straight into the define nick filters. So let me show you how we do that. We're going to go up to photo. We're going to go to edit in. And if you've already installed these plugins, you'll see all of your Nick collection right here. And what we're going to do is jump to define. And when we do, like we said in the previous video, this is going to take us to an external editor, which means we are now leaving Lightroom and going to a completely different piece of software. I'm going to choose to edit a copy with Lightroom adjustments because I've already made some corrections to this photograph. I think I cropped it and did some lens correction type stuff. And I want those to be part of the adjustment. So I'm going to include that. And once this feature opens or once this tool opens up, you're going to notice that there are these little white dots in the photograph. And basically what that's doing is it's telling you that these are the areas of the photograph that have been measured for noise. And based off this measurement, it's going to go through and apply automatically what it believes is the correct amount of noise reduction. Now with that said, if I look down here in the loop in the bottom right hand corner, you can see that there's a right side and a left side. There's a line splitting the difference. And if we look at the right side, you can see that that's clearly much less noisy than the left side. But if I want to look at an area that actually has more detail in it, I can actually do that a couple of ways. I can click and drag on the loop. You can do the same thing inside of Lightroom to move this around. Or I can choose this little pen here, this push pin feature. If I select that, I can go over to the photograph and put this pin near an area that has some detail. In this case, there's a little bit of a fuzziness around the ear. So I'm going to go here and I'm just going to click on the photograph and that's going to lock the loop so that even if I move my brush around or my mouse around like I'm doing here, you notice that the loop stays the same. And what that allows us to do is look in the loop a little bit more carefully and decide whether or not the detail has been kept or if there was too much noise reduction applied. Like I said, for the most part, I pretty much just run it and then I hit save. And that's it. I don't typically ever find myself needing to go into any of these settings up here to reduce or under method to manually make the corrections to this. Just the default settings alone in this program work awesome. So if you want to apply some noise reduction, select your photo, go into define, run it, and then just save it. And once you hit save, it's going to process this file, take it right back into Lightroom. Again because we made a copy, we're going to have two files. We're going to have the original file and now the second file with the noise reduction. Again if I go down here in my film strip and look, I can see that here is the image with the noise and here is the second file with the noise reduction applied. From here, once the noise reduction is applied, I just continue editing it, doing anything that it is that I want to do to it. And that can happen here inside of Lightroom or you could take it to Photoshop and continue editing it there. But in this case, reducing the noise is super simple. I actually think that this plugin works better and easier than the features that are built into Lightroom. Just one man's opinion, so don't kill me, but that's what I believe and that's why I use it. Hopefully you enjoyed this tip. If you did, give us a thumbs up. As always, we appreciate your support. Thank you so much for watching. We'll catch you in the next episode. My name is Adam. I'm out.