Where should I apply sharpening and noise reduction? I thought that at last step before export from lightroom these tif to jpg.
My final jpgs are party-like photographs and final result will be 2048 px for web and full resolution for dvd (maybe a bit smaller than full).
Hi,
I'd use modest noise reduction early in the workflow, and since part of your output is going to be down-sampled, I'd postpone sharpening for that down-sampled stage. The down-sampling will reduce noise, unless you've already sharpened it earlier. For the full resolution outputs you'd use either Capture One's noise reduction or Lightroom's, whatever works best. Capture One allows to use different output recipes, so you could use one to down-sample without sharpening, and another one with sharpening at full size, if you like the sharpening of Capture One (and it's not that bad really).
I'm not sure if LR does noise reduction post Raw conversion, or as a part of it, so it may be less effective when not combined with the Raw conversion. Anyway, use the noise reduction that works best for your workflow. Personally, I'd prefer a run through Topaz Denoise, which can be called from LR, or similar tools.
Also consider underexposing one or two stops (e.g. shoot at ISO1600 with an EV -1 correction instead of ISO 3200), and pushing the exposure in the Rawconverter. It likely gives a lower noise result than e.g. shooting at 3200, and it gives you one or two stops extra highlight headroom. Shooting scenarios that require such ISOs usually also have hard to control natural light or lightsources in the image.
Cheers,
Bart