Grainy looking photos can be a huge problem when you are first learning photography. You think that you are doing everything right, and then BAM! your image is grainy and not nearly as sharp and professional looking as you had intended. This is definitely an annoying problem for photographers that are experience and new, but luckily it is easy to fix.

The easiest way to solve noise reduction is to shoot at a lower ISO. The higher the ISO, the more noise you will have in your image. Now, sometimes there is no option when it comes to shooting in a high ISO. You could be somewhere where the lighting is simply too dark for the camera, and you need to bump up your ISO in order to see the subject in the image. So, simply adjusting your ISO to fix noise isn’t always going to be a solution.

When this happens, you are going to need to fix the image in Lightroom.  In the detail panel in the develop module, you will see a section for noise reduction. There are two different types of noise, Color and Luminance. Depending on which one you need to fix, you will move that slider. Color noise is when you see flecks of different colors in an image when you zoom in and it typically happens when you use a high ISO. Luminance noise is caused by the brightness in an image. Adjusting the luminance noise slider will fix the overall noise in an image, but you still might have to fix the color luminance as well to get the desired look in your picture. Just play with the sliders until you have found something that you like in your image.