Why does Lightroom’s Adjustment Brush seem to add noise outside the brushed area?
Asked 5/19/2013
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When I export the same RAW file from Lightroom twice—once with an Adjustment Brush edit enabled on the eyes and once with that brush turned off—I can see differences in the background as well as in the eyes.
To compare, I exported both versions as JPEGs, stacked them in Photoshop, and used a blend mode to highlight differences. I expected only the brushed eye area to change, but the background also shows fine grain/noise-like differences.
Why would a local Adjustment Brush change pixels outside the masked area? Is Lightroom adding noise, or is this an artifact of export/compression?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
13y ago
2 Answers
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I believe most of what you're seeing here is some kind of dithering. It's a common step when writing out processed data where the input data range is much larger than is needed for the final output. It has a way of masking tiny errors that creep in through a processing chain.
I don't think this is anything to worry about. Pretty much every music track produced in the past two decades or so has been dithered during the mix-down process from high resolution masters (e.g. 96 kHz 24-bit per channel) to delivery formats like CD and MP3. You can't hear its presence, though you might hear its absence! Since your ears are more sensitive to small differences than your eyes, I wouldn't worry about any dithering added by Lightroom.
Now, I said "most" of what you're seeing here is the dithering. You're also seeing some artifacts due purely to problems in your test method:
JPEG is the wrong format to use when pixel-peeping unless your aim is to look for differences introduced by the JPEG algorithm. JPEG is lossy: a difference in one pixel is likely to affect the values in 63 of its neighbors, however slightly.
Divide is the wrong tool for detecting image differences. Suffice it to say, there are several ways for it to give false negatives, which is to say that it can indicate that two pixels are the same when they are different. There is also at least one case I can think of where Divide will indicate that two pixels are different when they are the same!
A much better choice here is the Difference blend mode. It always gives a pure black image when the upper layer is exactly the same as the layer(s) below it.
You can also use the Apply Image command to do pixel-level forensics on an image.
Another superior option is ImageMagick's
comparetool.
Originally by user4141. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user4141
13y ago
0
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What you’re likely seeing is not the brush actually affecting the background, but tiny export differences caused by JPEG rendering/quantization and likely dithering.
Lightroom processes the whole image through its rendering pipeline when you export. Even if a local adjustment only changes a small area, the final JPEG encoding can produce very small pixel-level differences elsewhere in the image. Dithering is commonly used when reducing high-precision processed image data down to an 8-bit output format like JPEG, and it can look like faint random noise when you compare two exports at the pixel level.
Your difference test is extremely sensitive, so it reveals those tiny changes even though they’re not normally visible in real viewing.
So, in normal terms:
- the eyes are the intentional local change
- the background differences are most likely harmless dithering/compression-side effects
- this is generally nothing to worry about unless you can actually see a problem in normal viewing or printing
If you want to test further, compare higher-bit or lossless exports instead of JPEG, since JPEG makes tiny differences easier to detect in this kind of analysis.
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