Re: hi i am hoping someone can help. i am finding that when i increase the clarity on an image, it becomes very noisy/grainy. i am told there is a tool to denoise but i cant seem to find it on lr5. i looked at the tutorials but they seem to be for lr4

Posting a couple before/after clarity screen clips would help so we can see what your are concerned about.

As DJ said, with process 2012 you can really crank up the clarity without major degradation although more than 50 to me is overkill.

Are these RAW or JPG photos?  What are the pixel dimensions of the cropped area of the photo you are working on?  What is your clarity setting? 

You can see the cropped pixel dimensions in the Metadata Panel with EXIF turned on.