How to Deal With Moiré Quickly and Easily Using Lightroom

Moiré is that really annoying thing that happens when fine patterns seem to produce a rainbow (frequently purple and green) of bizarre colors that clearly don't belong to the actual object. This video will show you how to quickly and easily deal with it using Lightroom.

Coming to you from Tony and Chelsea Northrup, this helpful video will show you where to keep an eye out for moiré and how to use the local adjustment brush in Lightroom to get rid of it. Moiré is the result of spatial aliasing, which can occur when a high-frequency spatial pattern is sampled at a relatively lower resolution. In other words, things like fine fabrics can cause it, and the results can be both annoying and distracting. As the megapixel and sharpness race continues, many manufacturers have started removing the anti-aliasing filter from cameras, which does make the resultant images sharper, but also makes them more susceptible to this issue. Thankfully, Lightroom has a tool designed for exactly this problem, and with a little careful brushing and adjustment, it's easily fixed. Just be sure to know when to be on the lookout for it; it most often appears with fine fabrics.

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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3 Comments

From the Movie Set Memes FB page... I had to do it.

Does anyone really uses it in Lightroom or just talks about it?

I have an issue that moire removal disappears when exporting to jpg, and see no way how to fix it.

There is one single discussion of this problem I found on the entire net, it's three years old, and stops without conclusion.

What version of Lightroom is being used here, and what is the earliest version of Lightroom that has this moire removal tool?