Can you please post up close ups of smooth colours on your photos, so I can see how much noise there is.. cheers. Also say what ISO they were taken at.
Hmm.. been reading about noise.. seems I have a lot to learn!
You’ve been reading about stuff which you really don’t need to know about, haven’t you? And now you’re just buried in a geeky, confused hellhole of utter irrelevance.
I just ignore that rubbish and try and take nice photographs. 🙂
I feel a bit stupid though – I’ve been fiddling with various settings and then shooting and viewing in RAW.
Not sure how things work in Olympusland (where I believe you are) but on Nikons the various settings do still affect the RAW files in that they are recorded in the RAW file and used when viewing it in Nikon software like ViewNX and CaptureNX.
Of course, unlike JPGs, they are not “baked into” the RAW file, they are just recorded as part of it and can be changed at will.
Also if you shoot RAW+JPG then the resulting JPG will obviously use the various settings.
How about this?
The duck was taken with my Canon SX200 at 1:1, then 2:1 enlargement
The dog with my Canon S95 at 1:1, then 3:1 enlargement
S’why I had to replace the SX200, cos the noise was even visible at 1:1
(or have I missed the idea totally?!)
No no, I think you did the right thing. That top pic is terrible, my phone takes better pics than that. Looks like a lot of noise and some crazy attempts at correcting it.
did you have digital zoom enabled on the sx200? It looks like it’s gone into digital zoom. I wouldn’t expect that much granulation just from a normal pic.. unless for some reason you had the ISO value huge. It doesn’t look like a fair comparison at all.
another possibility is that you shot the duck at the full 12x zoom, with the camera in auto. In order for the camera to take the shot at full zoom, hand held, it had to ramp the ISO up itself – seems the max is 1600. see these two shots comparing iso 1600 with 100
The s95 has a much smaller telephoto effect at the long end of the zoom range, and I suspect the dog shot was at the more wide angle end of that range.. I suspect that shot was taken at a much lower ISO value.
So it’s not really the cameras fault the duck image looks nasty – i suspect you were just asking too much of it in the conditions. Had the S95 had the same lens on, the result would have as near as damnit identical
[edit] or had you taken the dog photo with the sx200 at the same zoom position in the same conditions, I reckon you’d have barely been able to tell the difference.
GrahamS do you so happen to know if that is true for Aperture / LR3 as well as NX2? Do they show NEF files while applying the settings you’ve done in the camera or just have specific NEF settings and ignore what the camera has stored?
Have to get my hands on NX2 and check it out I think.
GrahamS do you so happen to know if that is true for Aperture / LR3 as well as NX2?
I know when I played with them a while ago (few years) they basically just made up their own settings, partly because Nikon, in its “wisdom” encrypted certain settings to prevent them being read by third partys. 🙄
I have heard they have improved since but I’ve never gone back and tried them because I like CaptureNX a lot. (it’s quirky and has some odd interfaces but it does a really nice job).
Have to get my hands on NX2 and check it out I think.
I recommend you do! There is a fully functional free trial at http://www.capturenx.com as well as some video tutorials (which you made need to suss the unusual interface).
ViewNX2 is freely available from Nikon too and does a lot of the basic operations that CaptureNX does.
If you want to get properly geeky there is always DxOMark:
but they don’t take into account the sensors native iso. the 5dII is 160, this has less noise than 100 (especially the pattern noise in the shadows) and all multiples show less noise than the intermediate iso’s.
i only use 160/320/640 etc.
a bit of a pointless exercise looking at other peoples noise if you have no idea what software they were processed in and what noise reduction (if any was used). where a particular tone sits on the histogram has a big part to play to.
leave the meausebating to the geeky meauserbators. if you know where to find this info on the web and how to apply it to real world shooting. you can then stop wasting time and take some pictures.
it’s not that relevant if you are only posting sunset pics to flickr.