Question about noise from heavy editing and upgrading camera

[epp_b]

This is a shot at ISO 200 on my D40:



As you can see, the sky is quite noisy. This is because I made some extreme adjustments to the curves to give it the contrasty look that I wanted.

Here is the dull original:



Now, I know one way I can avoid exaggerating the noise so much is to shoot in RAW, but that can only work so much.

Would a camera with a newer, better-performing sensor (eg.: D90, D300, etc.) allow for a less exaggerated effect on the noise upon such extreme curve adjustments?

 

[goodoneian]

your editing and the fact that the picture is probably somewhat underexposed is what gave you the noise. i don't think that upgrading bodies would give you much different results. especially at iso 200

 

[epp_b]

Ah ... I just looked back at the EXIF and I did underexpose it by 2/3rds of stop of what I normally do (so it was actually -1.3 EV) to make sure I didn't clip any highlights in the sky.

Thanks.

 

[Steph]

Well, the problem is really with the exposure (not the camera). If you pointed the camera to a bright sky and left it to make the exposure itself, it would underexpose to render the sky middle grey; then you underexposed by 2/3 making the picture even darker. 'Expose to the right' might be the answer to the exposure problem you encountered with this picture.

 

[TamiyaGuy]

As has been said before, underexposure played a major part of what made your photograph so noisy; shadows are much more liable to noise than highlights are (although, with highlights, losing detail is more of a problem).

Upgrading your camera body may benefit your photos somewhat, but it's the editing that really brings out the noise of the photograph. Bear in mind that any type of image editing degrades the image quality, be it Unsharp Mask, Contrast adjustment, or Noise Reduction. Of course, the advantages of the adjustment often outweigh the slight degradation of quality.

Talking about the photo, I personally think the noise really adds something to it. It's turned a really quite (no offence) boring snap of a cloudy sky into a powerful, moody shot. Keep it up, I'll have to try it out sometime .

Was it just Curves adjustment with a strong S-curve? Curious ^_^

 

[epp_b]

To be honest, it was actually just auto-curves in Corel PhotoPaint

I use it quite a lot. Most of the time, it gives me the same results that I'd eventually come up with by adjusting the curve manually.

 

[Garbz]

Noise is distrubted around the black point in an image. So in a perfectly exposed image it doesn't appear at low ISOs, (i.e. noise with a deviation of 2-3 values will be dominated by the bright content of the image.)

But now under expose everything and boost the expoure in photoshop then the noise is boosted along with the rest of the image. RAW really doesn't help here at all.

 

[GeneralBenson]

Ah ... I just looked back at the EXIF and I did underexpose it by 2/3rds of stop of what I normally do (so it was actually -1.3 EV) to make sure I didn't clip any highlights in the sky.

Thanks.

Well, judging by your original photo, you're about 2/3 of a histogram away from clipping highlights. Underexposing that far and pullout as much detail as you did, you'll get noise on any camera's file.