How to Fix Grain in Lightroom

If you have a photo with some of grain in it, you can use the Develop module in Lightroom to smooth it with a simple slider!

The image I used to show this in the video below was extremely underexposed. I slid the exposure slider all the way up to 4.8 to make the image brighter. It looks pretty good from farther away, but if you zoom in into a darker spot of the image, you can see there’s quite a bit of grain.

If you want to smooth out grain in an image, select your image and make sure you are in the Develop module in Lightroom. Scroll down to the area that says “noise reduction”. Use the luminance slider. Move the slider to the right to smooth out the noise. For the image in the video, I move that slider up to 25.

If you want to add more detail back into the image after you smooth it out, you can move the “detail” slider up to the right as well. A little goes a long way here! For the image I’m working on in the video, I move the detail slider to 55.

I like my digital images to look like they were photographed on film so I always add a little grain to my digital photos in Lightroom. If I have an image that needed exceessive eposure added in post, I will smooth it out, using the luminance slider. I will then add a little extra grain to the image. This grain is different than the orginal grain I just smoothed! I can choose the size and roughness of the grain so I can make it look more like a film photograph.

To do this you’ll scroll down to the “effects” section in the Develop module. Use the sliders to add grain. You can adjust the size and roughness of the grain you would like to add. In my image in this video, my settings were 28 for grain, 40 for size, and 47 for roughness. The grain in medium format film is finer than that of 35mm film. The 35mm film grain tends to be a larger and more rough. So for this image, I chose a larger grain, with more roughness to emulate 35mm film grain. I like that for this image because I feel like I had a lot of grain anyways, and this kind of smooths it out and covers it up, making it a little bit more film like!

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