Grainy photo when opening for editing

[Penshockeyfan]

Hello everyone, this is my first post to these forums! I have a question about trying to edit a picture I took the other day. I shot the crescent moon with Venus visible, and some of the sunset still visible also. The pics came out nice, but I wanted to edit them a little bit. I am using Corel Photo Paint x6 and importing the RAW file into the program. When the photo is viewed in Windows, it looks crisp and clear, and you can see some details in the moon. When I open the picture to edit it, it is super grainy and no details can be seen. Here is the original pic I took, no edits:

_DSC0006 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Here is a screen shot of how it looks when opened in Corel for editing:

http://i252.photobucket.com/albums/hh35/rynosims/Screenshot.png

The shot was taken with my Nokon D5100, F/9, 10 second exposure at ISO 800.
Even when I try to eliminate noise, the moon just looks like a big white blur, and the sky is much lighter and grainy. I mostly want to cut off the left and right sides and make it a portrait orientation, and increase saturation a little to bring out the reds a bit more. Any help is much appreciated!

 

[SCraig]

PaintShop Pro's RAW editor has never been the best available. PSP X3 was absolutely horrible, X4 a bit better. I haven't tried later versions but it just never impressed me a lot.

I haven't tried it myself but you might try downloading RAW Therapee and see what it looks like there. You can then export the RAW file to another format (TIF or something lossless) and finishing your editing in PSP.

The fact that PSP doesn't handle RAW files well is the reason I stopped using it. There are much better RAW converters in other software, including Corel's own Aftershot (which was previously Bibble 5). I personally prefer Nikon Capture NX2 but Adobe Lightroom is popular by many. DxO Optics 9 is also very, very good.

 

[KmH]

What you are seeing is image noise. Film has grain.
I con't add much more to what Scott has said. He has had a lot more experience with Corel's products.

Because of the way digital images and digital cameras work, image noise is always more visible in the darker stops of exposure in a digital photo.

If you would like to learn more about what happens see:
http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adob...ly/prophotographer/pdfs/pscs3_renderprint.pdf
http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/pdfs/linear_gamma.pdf

 

[Penshockeyfan]

So essentially it's because of the high ISO setting and long exposure? But, why does Windows picture viewer bring up suck a good view, but Corel bring up such a terrible view when trying to edit?