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Mastering the Detail Panel

February 16, 2020 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Photographers are always trying to draw out the finest parts of their prized photos. In Lightroom, we handle that efficiently with the Detail Panel

You’ll find the Detail panel in Lightroom’s Develop module. It’s what we use to handle the fine details and enhance the finer points of our photos. The Detail panel has two main functions: sharpening and noise reduction. Let’s take an in-depth look at what each of these does, and how we can use them.

Sharpening

Sharpening is for enhancing the detail of our photos. We can draw

The sharpening portion of the detail panel has four factors that control how we sharpen the image:

  • Amount – this is pretty basic
  • Radius – 
  • Detail – 
  • Masking – 

Tread carefully with the sharpening function! I know so many photographers who try to restore sharpness to a blurry photo. This isn’t an instant fix slider. As is the key with all edits, we can only enhance what we got with the camera to begin with.

Noise Reduction

Noise is a fact of life in photography. The higher we set our ISO value or the more that we tweak exposure, the more noise that our photos will show. Newer cameras manage noise better, but you’re still going to see it.

(image here of what noise looks like)

The good news is that Lightroom 3 introduced some really impressive noise reduction, and Lightroom 4 has helped grow that even further. With this feature, we can remove the noise in our images and clean them up nicely.

The issue is that when we remove noise, we’re also removing detail from the images. Software has a hard time balancing removing the bad detail in the form of noise with preserving the detail that we want in our images.

Noise reduction has five factors that control how we remove detail. In general, moving the slider further to the right increases noise reduction.

  • Luminance – 
  • Detail – 
  • Contrast – 
  • Color – 
  • Detail – 
Typically,

Wrapping Up

The Detail panel is important for managing the sharpening and noise reduction of our images. Each image is going to require some different settings to get it twaeked perfetly. Remember to work at a close level of zoom and tread lightly to

Any questions about the Detail panel? How can I help you understand it better? Check in with a comment so I can help you love Lightroom.

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