Use of Luminance Smoothing and Color Noise Reduction in ARC

[Andrew]

I shoot in RAW format with a Nikon D70 and have been using Adobe Raw Converter to prepare the image file for Elements 3.0. Most of the controls in ARC are easy to understand but I am puzzled about the Luminance Smoothing and Color Noise Reduction sliders. When should these be used? Most people recommend to leave these alone at their default settings (0 and 25) but I am sure Adobe designed these controls for a reason. Any insights are greatly appreciated.

[Wendy]

Hi Andrew ...

Both of those controls are to do with colour noise reduction so if you do have a noisy image try them out on it. Most people do seem to prefer to deal with noise within photoshop itself so I suspect that is why they say leave it at the default settings :)

Wendy

[Andrew]

Wendy,

thanks for the reply. I understand the color noise reduction control but what about luminance smoothing? What does it do and under what conditions would you use it?

Andrew

[Wendy]

Hi Andrew,

Luminance smoothing is also for noise reduction ... take a look at this link. It is for the Camera Raw in Photoshop but it gives you some info on luminance smoothing:

http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototips/adobe-camera-raw-detail-tab.html


Wendy