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As part of a recent forum discussion, one of our members suggested I write a tutorial on Lightroom processing for the Pentax Q series of cameras. Some great tutorial books already exist, and they do a much better job than I can of explaining how and why Lightroom does what it does. However, I thought it might be useful to run through an example of the typical processing I perform on a Q or Q7 image.

When processing photos, my aim is to make them look good enough for full screen viewing on my 17" laptop at a distance of around 60cm (~ 24"). Pixel-peepers - those who look for every suggestion of noise, sharpening artefacts or smudged details - will likely be disappointed with my end results, and that's fine with me. We digital photographers are an unrealistic and unforgiving bunch when critiquing our own photos and especially those of others. We forget that the majority of sane individuals are more than happy with the JPEGs from their smartphones. I aim to make my photos look good enough for viewing by a regular, sane audience - not pixel-peepers

With photos taken at higher ISO settings, it's sometimes impossible to produce a good quality, screen-filling image due to noise in the source photo. Insufficient noise reduction will result in too much noise remaining, while too much noise reduction results in loss of detail and an unrealistically-smoothed appearance. If I'm unable to find a balance between noise reduction and loss of detail, I either (a) accept that a noisy photo is better than no photo at all and increase my viewing distance, or (b) reduce the final output size until the noise isn't so bothersome. Or, if all else fails, (c) ... convert to black and white

A quick word or two about my computer. I use a Hewlett Packard Envy 17" with Intel Core i7 processor and 12GB RAM, and I colour profile the screen using an X-Rite ColorMunki Display tool (if accurate colour reproduction is important to you, I recommend getting one of these or a similar product). I run Lightroom 6, the stand-alone version of Lightroom. I do use other software for specific tasks and effects, but 95% of my processing is in Lightroom only, and that's all I'll use for this example.

One final note before we begin. Image hosting on these forums imposes significant compression on uploaded files, which softens detail. Please bear this in mind when reviewing any photos and crops presented here. What I see on screen is sharper than you'll see in this article.

Now, let's review a photo I took just for this demonstration...

Here's a Praktica Super TL1000 camera and Pentacon 50/1.8 lens that I picked up at a flea-market recently. I set it up on a table along with a few other bits and pieces to add colours and texture to the scene. The blue background has quite a lot of grain; the camera skin, strap and cleaning cloth have plenty of fine detail. And there's some printed text on a box of lens wipes. The lighting was a combination of natural daylight coming through the window, and indoor kitchen lighting. So, a good, varied test subject.

I took two identical shots - one RAW, one JPEG - at ISO 3200 (I used the "Natural" Custom Image setting, with sharpening of +2, and Auto High ISO NR). The JPEG is a 3MP file (1920x1440 pixels) at the highest-quality setting, straight out of the camera with no further processing. This size is ideal for display on my laptop, which has native screen resolution of 1920 x 1080. After importing the RAW file into Lightroom, I did my post-processing then exported the developed image to a second 1920x1440 JPEG.

First, let's look at the straight-out-of-camera JPEG, resized for inclusion in this article:



It doesn't look too bad for a high ISO image. Considering the sensor size and the age of the camera, it's really quite good, although it's too smooth and some detail is lost due to in-camera noise reduction. It's a touch too dark, and there's something of an overall blue cast and/or magenta tint - probably due to the white balance getting confused by the grey lens wipe box. It should have a slightly yellow tone, but the camera's white balance has compensated to make it neutral grey instead.

Now let's see my processed version:



At this size, it's difficult to see a huge improvement, but it's definitely better. The colours are slightly different - much closer to reality (you'll have to take my word for that ) - due to my white balance adjustment, and I've fine-tuned certain individual colours (red, green and blue). There's more detail and the photo is considerably sharper, though you may not be able to see that here.

Let’s look at some side by side 1:1 crops of both images. On the left are the crops from the camera's own JPEG, and on the right, my processed version:













We can see that there's much more detail retained in my processed image than in the straight-out-of-camera JPEG. There's still some noise - a little more, in fact, as I've chosen to retain more detail and avoid an unnatural "smoothed out" look. At the intended viewing distance at full screen reproduction, this processed version looks great

My approach when processing Pentax Q-series photos is as follows:

With the RAW image, I set the camera profile and lens corrections. Then I adjust the white balance and, if necessary, exposure. If the blacks are crushed or whites blown, I try to adjust those to the limits of the histogram (if either is too far gone to recover, I set them at a level that looks right). I bring down highlights to recover details in the brighter areas, and carefully pull the shadows up to reveal a bit more detail, stopping at the point where I see either no more detail or too much noise. I also add a little clarity to give the image a bit of "pop". I apply default colour noise reduction, but set my luminance noise reduction and sharpening to zero. I then export to a TIFF file resized for the final image resolution. To that TIFF file, I apply luminance noise reduction and sharpening, then export to a final JPEG.

Each image will require different settings, but the approach is the same. Here are the settings I used for this particular photo:

Camera Calibration - Profile: Embedded (thereby using the camera's own profile stored with the image)

Lens Corrections - Remove Chromatic Aberration and Enable Profile Corrections both selected and set to Auto

Note that it's important - critical, even - to make the above profile and lens correction settings before doing anything else, as they result in fundamental changes to the base image that can't easily be addressed later in the workflow. I have these set as defaults when I import.

Basic adjustments - White Balance 5250 with a tint of -6 (using the eye-dropper to sample a neutral area), Exposure +0.3, Highlights -50, Blacks +26, Clarity +10

HSL (Hue, Saturation and Luminance) - Hue: Green +10, Blue -20; Saturation: Red -10, Blue +10; Luminance: Red -24, Green -49; this was done by trial and error until the colours in the photo matched those in the scene. In real-world photography you won't have the original scene to refer to, so you'll have to work from memory and simply do the best you can.

Detail - Sharpening and Luminance noise reduction set to 0, Color noise reduction at default of 25

Then, I exported to a 16-bit TIFF file resized to 1920x1080 and performed the remaining adjustments:

Sharpening - Amount 60, Radius 0.6, Detail 25, Masking 70
Noise Reduction - Luminance 40, Detail 50, Contrast 0; Color 0
Basic adjustments - Clarity +10 (a little boost for the final image!)

Note: I find that carrying out luminance noise reduction and sharpening on a resized TIFF yields better results with the Q's images. Note the high masking value for sharpening - this ensured that I was only sharpening the key features of the image - any remaining noise was left unsharpened. This works far better than Lightroom's output sharpening, which affects everything indiscriminately!

And finally, I exported to JPEG at the same resolution, with no additional output sharpening. That's it... Done!

Hopefully this demonstrates that shooting RAW and processing in Lightroom can yield significant improvements in IQ, especially at higher ISO settings.

For those who'd like to view the original files and perhaps try out some processing themselves, here are the links:

Straight-out-of-camera JPEG (875 KB)
Straight-out-of-camera DNG RAW (18 MB)
Intermediate TIFF (16 MB)
Final processed JPEG (2 MB)

If you've got this far, thanks for reading and I hope this is of some benefit. As I said at the beginning, we all have different expectations and tolerances in our image processing, so use this as a starting point and fine tune the adjustments as you see fit on an image-by-image basis. Oh, and feel free to ask questions; I'll do my best to help.

Good luck and happy shooting

[Na Horuk]

You got really good results! Brought out lots of detail and made the photo really good, despite the high ISO. And your PP stayed within bounds so that the photo does not look unnatural or overprocessed

I would just add that if you are exporting to tiff, you might as well do that at the beginning and use specialized NR and sharpening LR plugins like Topaz (has deals with PentaxForums) and NikEffects (this one is free now). These plugins have better Noise reduction and Sharpening algorithms than LR, in my opinion. Their downside is they work only with uncompressed tiff files, which are much larger than the original Dng files. I only use it for some images, where I anticipate a marked improvement. Not all photos need to be stunningly sharp and clear, but it does help with some subjects/scenes.

[BigMackCam]

You got really good results! Brought out lots of detail and made the photo really good, despite the high ISO. And your PP stayed within bounds so that the photo does not look unnatural or overprocessed

Thanks for the kind words. Like I said, processing is a very individual thing - we all have different tolerance levels for noise, sharpness and detail, but this worked out OK, I think

I would just add that if you are exporting to tiff, you might as well do that at the beginning and use specialized NR and sharpening LR plugins like Topaz (has deals with PentaxForums) and NikEffects (this one is free now). These plugins have better Noise reduction and Sharpening algorithms than LR, in my opinion.

This is an interesting area for discussion... I've tried a number of different post-processing tools including those you mention, and I've yet to find one that equals Lightroom where colour noise reduction is concerned - primarily when dealing with very high ISO files. Google Nik Dfine 2, for example, is unable to smooth out green and magenta blotching as well as Lightroom. I do, however, like its luminance noise reduction results, and I occasionally use that instead of Lightroom for luminance noise.

It's a while since I've tried Topaz Denoise... again, I found it didn't offer what I wanted for colour noise reduction, but seemed powerful with luminance noise. I should try it out again, and spend a bit more time learning to use it effectively.

Thanks for the feedback

[tabjohnson]

As part of a recent forum discussion, one of our members suggested I write a tutorial on Lightroom processing for the Pentax Q series of cameras. Some great tutorial books already exist, and they do a much better job than I can of explaining how and why Lightroom does what it does. However, I thought it might be useful to run through an example of the typical processing I perform on a Q or Q7 image.

When processing photos, my aim is to make them look good enough for full screen viewing on my 17" laptop at a distance of around 60cm (~ 24"). Pixel-peepers - those who look for every suggestion of noise, sharpening artefacts or smudged details - will likely be disappointed with my end results, and that's fine with me. We digital photographers are an unrealistic and unforgiving bunch when critiquing our own photos and especially those of others. We forget that the majority of sane individuals are more than happy with the JPEGs from their smartphones. I aim to make my photos look good enough for viewing by a regular, sane audience - not pixel-peepers

With photos taken at higher ISO settings, it's sometimes impossible to produce a good quality, screen-filling image due to noise in the source photo. Insufficient noise reduction will result in too much noise remaining, while too much noise reduction results in loss of detail and an unrealistically-smoothed appearance. If I'm unable to find a balance between noise reduction and loss of detail, I either (a) accept that a noisy photo is better than no photo at all and increase my viewing distance, or (b) reduce the final output size until the noise isn't so bothersome. Or, if all else fails, (c) ... convert to black and white

A quick word or two about my computer. I use a Hewlett Packard Envy 17" with Intel Core i7 processor and 12GB RAM, and I colour profile the screen using a X-Rite ColorMunki Display tool (if accurate colour reproduction is important to you, I recommend getting one of these or a similar product). I run Lightroom 6, the stand-alone version of Lightroom. I do use other software for specific tasks and effects, but 95% of my processing is in Lightroom only, and that's all I'll use for this example.

One final note before we begin. Image hosting on these forums imposes significant compression on uploaded files, which softens detail. Please bear this in mind when reviewing any photos and crops presented here. What I see on screen is sharper than you'll see in this article.

Now, let's review a photo I took just for this demonstration...

Here's a Praktica TL1000 camera and Pentacon 50/1.8 lens that I picked up at a flea-market recently. I set it up on a table along with a few other bits and pieces to add colours and texture to the scene. The blue background has quite a lot of grain; the camera skin, strap and cleaning cloth have plenty of fine detail. And there's some printed text on a box of lens wipes. The lighting was a combination of natural daylight coming through the window, and indoor kitchen lighting. So, a good, varied test subject.

I took two identical shots - one RAW, one JPEG - at ISO 3200 (I used the "Natural" Custom Image setting, with sharpening of +2, and Auto High ISO NR). The JPEG is a 3MP file (1920x1440 pixels) at the highest-quality setting, straight out of the camera with no further processing. This size is ideal for display on my laptop, which has native screen resolution of 1920 x 1080. After importing the RAW file into Lightroom, I did my post-processing then exported the developed image to a second 1920x1440 JPEG.

First, let's look at the straight-out-of-camera JPEG, resized for inclusion in this article:



It doesn't look too bad for a high ISO image. Considering the sensor size and the age of the camera, it's really quite good, although it's too smooth and some detail is lost. It's a touch too dark, and there's something of an overall blue cast - probably due to the white balance getting confused by the grey lens wipe box. It should have a slightly yellow tone, but the camera's white balance has compensated to make it neutral grey instead.

Now let's see my processed version:



At this size, it's difficult to see a huge improvement, but it's definitely better. The colours are slightly different - much closer to reality (you'll have to take my word for that ) - due to my white balance adjustment, and I've fine-tuned certain individual colours (red, green and blue). The photo is also considerably sharper, though you may not be able to see that here.

Let’s look at some side by side 1:1 crops of both images. On the left are the crops from the camera's own JPEG, and on the right, my processed version:













We can see that there's a *lot* more detail retained in my processed image than in the straight-out-of-camera JPEG. There's still some noise - a little more, in fact, as I've decided to retain more detail and avoid an unnatural "smoothed out" look. At the intended viewing distance at full screen reproduction, this processed version looks great

My approach when processing Pentax Q-series photos is as follows:

With the RAW image, I set the camera profile and lens corrections. Then I adjust the white balance and, if necessary, exposure. I bring down highlights to recover details in the brighter areas, and carefully pull the shadows up to reveal a bit more detail, stopping at the point where I see either no more detail or too much noise. I also add a little clarity to give the image a bit of "pop". I apply default colour noise reduction, but set my luminance noise reduction and sharpening to zero. I then export to a TIFF file resized for the final image resolution. To that TIFF file, I apply luminance noise reduction and sharpening, then export to a final JPEG.

Each image will require different settings, but the approach is the same. Here are the settings I used for this particular photo:

Camera Calibration - Profile: Embedded (thereby using the camera's own profile stored with the image)

Lens Corrections - Remove Chromatic Aberration and Enable Profile Corrections both selected and set to Auto

Basic adjustments - White Balance 5250 with a tint of -6 (using the eye-dropper to sample a neutral area), Exposure +0.3, Highlights -50, Blacks +26, Clarity +10

HSL (Hue, Saturation and Luminance) - Hue: Green +10, Blue -20; Saturation: Red -10, Blue +10; Luminance: Red -24, Green -49; this was done by trial and error until the colours in the photo matched those in the scene. In real-world photography you won't have the original scene to refer to, so you'll have to work from memory and simply do the best you can.

Detail - Sharpening and Luminance noise reduction set to 0, Color noise reduction at default of 25

Then, I exported to a 16-bit TIFF file resized to 1920x1080 and performed the remaining adjustments:

Sharpening - Amount 60, Radius 0.6, Detail 25, Masking 70
Noise Reduction - Luminance 40, Detail 50, Contrast 0; Color 0
Basic adjustments - Clarity +10 (a little boost for the final image!)

And finally, I exported to JPEG at the same resolution, with no additional output sharpening. That's it... Done!

Hopefully this demonstrates that shooting RAW and processing in Lightroom can yield significant improvements in IQ, especially at higher ISO settings.

If you've got this far, thanks for reading and I hope this is of some benefit. As I said at the beginning, we all have different expectations and tolerances in our image processing, so feel free to use this as a starting point and fine tune the adjustments as you see fit on an image-by-image basis. Oh, and feel free to ask questions; I'll do my best to help.

Good luck and happy shooting

Thank you for taking the time to demonstrate your high iso post processing work flow. Now we all need to shoot more photos and worry less about Ricoh's next move. If they kill the system, maybe that wide angle zoom will be more affordable for all of us!

[Na Horuk]

and I've yet to find one that equals Lightroom where colour noise reduction is concerned - primarily when dealing with very high ISO files.

That's an interesting observation. I used an older version of LR to begin with, and I am usually more preoccupied with the luminance noise, not so much colour. I'll give it some more thought!

[CarlJF]

Great post BigMackCam! many thanks for your time to prepare this.

I would like to overstate the importance if your first to two steps:

Camera Calibration - Profile: Embedded (thereby using the camera's own profile stored with the image)

Lens Corrections - Remove Chromatic Aberration and Enable Profile Corrections both selected and set to Auto

Although they're good to use with any camera-lens, it's critical to activate these functions with the Q. The Q lenses all show significant distortion needing to be corrected in software. It's really important to correct them first, no matter how you process after, if you want to get something looking better than OOC jpg.

[BigMackCam]

Thank you, Carl - much appreciated

I've edited my initial post with a note to emphasis the importance of those settings. Thanks for the feedback.

[Tony Belding]

I'll have to review this article and experiment at some length, especially with regard to the noise reduction and sharpening strategies -- neither of which I've given much priority to in the past. I'm sure I can pick up something useful.

I'm pretty tolerant of noise, especially luminance noise, which to me resembles film grain. A limited amount of noise can actually provide a helpful "texture" to some images, giving the eye something to focus on, and creating the illusion of detail or sharpness where it may have been lacking. And of course, in the more extreme cases, you can always convert to B&W and pretend it was Tri-X!

One subject this article seems to gloss over, and which I have delved into quite a bit, is presets. Adobe's standard default setting is neutral and bland. It's good as a starting point, not as a finished look. However, the preset system in LR is very powerful. If I find myself having to manually adjust every image -- and worse, having to manually apply the same adjustments to each image -- then I figure I'm just not using the right preset! Ideally, the preset I applied during import should get me 90% of the way there, with only minor tweaks to follow.

I've been using film emulation presets, mostly from Replichrome. Some people may have a philosophical objection to these, considering them pretentious or artifical or whatnot. I find them useful. A "raw" image isn't really an image, it's not finished, and the way you finish it is arbitrary and subjective. A film preset is no more unnatural than what the JPEG engine in your camera would put out. The questions that matter are: "Does this look good? Is this the look I want?" Often I find the Fujifilm Reala 100 or Kodak Ektar 100 presets are what get me there.

Also worth noting. . . If you're using a Fujifilm camera, or a Sony camera, or some other brands, then Lightroom provides you with a full set of Camera Profiles that can neatly emulate the various settings of the camera's own JPEG engine. This is not provided for Pentax, unfortunately. Filling in that omission is another reason why I bought into the Replichrome presets.

[BigMackCam]

One subject this article seems to gloss over, and which I have delved into quite a bit, is presets. Adobe's standard default setting is neutral and bland. It's good as a starting point, not as a finished look. However, the preset system in LR is very powerful. If I find myself having to manually adjust every image -- and worse, having to manually apply the same adjustments to each image -- then I figure I'm just not using the right preset! Ideally, the preset I applied during import should get me 90% of the way there, with only minor tweaks to follow.

Hi Tony... Thanks for the feedback

As I mentioned at the start of the article, it's not intended to be a Lightroom tutorial... There are excellent books for that, such as this one by Martin Evening which covers the subject of presets (and everything else) in detail. This was really meant to demonstrate the types of adjustments I make to an image, and doesn't cover any automation I may use.

I tend not to use commercial or other third party presets with Lightroom, though I see no problem in doing so. I do have a few set up for typical looks that I like to achieve. I also use the Google Nik Suite plug-ins, of which Color Efex Pro, Analog Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro are my favourites. Again, I tend not to use their built in presets, except perhaps as starting points for my own editing...

[barondla]

Thank you BigMacAcm for this clear and concise tutorial. You achieved much better results than the ooc jpegs. I like that your results still look natural. Tutorial is very well done. Didn't realize the importance of doing lens corrections first. Will have to give all this a spin on the Q.
thanks for all the time and effort,
barondla

[BigMackCam]

^^^ You're very welcome. Thanks for the kind feedback; I appreciate it

[Marktax]

Thanks for that nice contribution of information. Well and painstakingly done! I accidentally stumbled myself on exporting from LR to TIFF to get what looks like better noise reduction, using K-3 RAW files, and it seems effective. But I do not know the mechanics of WHY that works. What's going on there?

And for the Q7, its strength to me remains that you can have a full system with you in a really small case, and when something presents itself, you are ready. I got a lot of shots of this band Sunday, but with a 70-200 f2.8 APS-C or FF rig, I would have looked like some kind of pro ripping off photos from the poor guy who was actually hired to shoot the event. With Q7, I'm shooting with what looks like a toy camera, and I'll bet I got the shot of the day . . .

[jimr-pdx]

Nice work on bringing those shots to life. I'll never forget how much better my old Fuji F550 was in raw mode, with your methods I could have pulled out even more data.
And I never saw the SuperTL upgrade before now, the original was my first SLR in 1972

[zippythezip]

Thanks for that nice contribution of information. Well and painstakingly done! I accidentally stumbled myself on exporting from LR to TIFF to get what looks like better noise reduction, using K-3 RAW files, and it seems effective. But I do not know the mechanics of WHY that works. What's going on there?

And for the Q7, its strength to me remains that you can have a full system with you in a really small case, and when something presents itself, you are ready. I got a lot of shots of this band Sunday, but with a 70-200 f2.8 APS-C or FF rig, I would have looked like some kind of pro ripping off photos from the poor guy who was actually hired to shoot the event. With Q7, I'm shooting with what looks like a toy camera, and I'll bet I got the shot of the day . . .

Looks like High Plains Jamboree, just got the album, even up here in Canada.

[Marktax]

Looks like High Plains Jamboree, just got the album, even up here in Canada.

Correct! And that was quick! Saw them yesterday here in DC (10/2).