Grain at low ISO on 20D

[Azuth]

I've noticed that even in low ISO (100) that the image quality seems a little off to me from my 20D. I'd like to hear from others whether I'm nuts, or they also think it seems off.

I've attached a small part of an image to hopefully illustrate what I mean. This was shot RAW and opened with Adobe bridge at 300DPI. The exposure was pushed up by 0.30, but that's not a controlling factor. Particularly noticeable if you look at the material and the shadow, I don't think it's just the weave of the material I'm seeing.

This image is just a crop, not enlarged.

Shot at 1/60 f7.1 under strobes.

Could I get the thoughts of some others, particularly Canon users.

 

[darich]

I had a 20D for around 18months and never noiticed it to be this bad.
I'm surprised it's like this if the settings are as you say they are.
Pushing the exposure will increase it a bit but i doubt to the level that's shown.

What are other images like?
What about natural light?
You don't say what lens you used - this can sometimes have an adverse affect on quality.

I've never used Adobe bridge before either - i opened my RAW images directly in photoshop and save them as TIFFs.

 

[Alex_B]

pushing exposure always has som effect like this. However it is quite pronounced in your example, I agree.

Do you brighten up the shadows in your images in the raw conversion process? Then you locally can get a much stronger push in exposure. To me it looks a bit like this.

 

[Azuth]

The general consensus (I posted the same thing elsewhere) is that my image was under exposed, and that even the small bump in exposure had this effect on shadow detail.

I did a quick comparison and this seems like a strong possibility. I intend to pay close attention to the histogram on my next shoot and see if I can do better.

 

[Garbz]

You mentioned you shoot in RAW. Did you apply noise reduction as part of your post processing? RAW images are less sharp, and noisier than saving as JPEGs as noise reduction and sharpening form a big part of post processing of sensor data.

 

[Big Mike]

I have found that with some RAW software, the default noise reduction is zero. Turn that up and it should help.

 

[Azuth]

Yeah. As I posted in another thread. I bought a book that was recommended to me called Real World Camera Raw with Photoshop CS by Bruce Fraser. It's already showing results.

 

[Mohain]

Expose right and you should get no noise. Allways keep an eye on your histogram and turn off any sharpening in your RAW converters software.