How do you bring down noise without losing much of sharpness even at ISO of 1600?

k.udhay

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I watched this video of Pye on YouTube:



While I was impressed with his idea of using CTO gels to produce golden hour images, I was taken aback when he said he used ISO of 1600 on his Canon 5D mark iii.

I have come across this message that 5D mark iii behaves extremely well in low light conditions. But doesn't ISO 1600 sound too high? And I don't find any problem in the pictures that he showed in his video.

I assume he used post processing to drop noise.

1) How do you control noise in post production - Do you use any plug-in or just camera raw?

2) How do you maintain sharpness while reducing noise?

3) Can you post some pics. that you shot at high ISO with acceptable noise level and sharpness pl.?
 
Acceptable noise is kind of subjective.

For me 1600 ISO on a 5D mk 3 is plenty good. No real need to mess with it.

I shoot a 7D mk 2 and it handles 1600 without the need for clean up. If I do find that I have to clean some noise I use define from the NIK collection for lightroom.

Here is ISO 3200 with no cleaning of noise.

Squirrel by Trevor Baldwin, on Flickr
 
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Acceptable noise is kind of subjective.

For me 1600 ISO on a 5D mk 3 is plenty good. No real need to mess with it.

I shoot a 7D mk 2 and it's handle 1600 without the need for clean up. If I do find that I have to clean some noise I use define from the NIK collection for lightroom.

Here is ISO 3200 with no cleaning of noise.

Squirrel by Trevor Baldwin, on Flickr

Awesome!
Could you tell these too pl.?
1. What was the distance between camera and the subject?
2. Aperture? [Edit - Got to know as f/4.0 from Flickr]
 
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ISO 1,600 is VERY usable on better full-frame cameras. At least as far as in people photography, where expression and emotion are paramount. No, it is not as "clean: as ISO 100 or 125 or 160, but it is not "terrible". If the exposures are generous, not wayyyy under-exposed, then ISO 1,600 is going to create decent images, especially if there is ample light present.

Many,many times, people resort to ISO 1,600 and then under-expose, at say an effective Exposure Index level of say 3,200 or 6,400 or worse, and it looks likerubbish! But if you have the ISO set high, AND you expose adequately and there is actually LIGHT present, 1,600 on a 5D Mark III is very useable.

I dunno...cleaning up noise and removing detail is also sort of subjective; what one person calls good, or acceptable, or bad--that all depends on the individual! to ME, agai, to ME, sharpness is accentuated with the noise left IN the image!!! I would rather see more high-frequency detail along with noise,m than no noise, and a loss of high-frequency detail! I am not a big fan of killing noise to the point that more than 15 to 20 percent of detail is lost; to me, again, I prefer to see the noise and to see more detail, to less noise and less fine detail!
 
As pretty much said above iso 1600 should not be a problem for a proper exposed photo on a 5d3. I'd say under certain circumstances iso 6400 would even be ok, though it is of course always better to try and use lowest iso possible for the correct exposure.

Removing noise is subjective also, as said above, but remember that really you should probably only try rescue a photo if it is in Raw format. If your camera is in jpeg it likely has already applied noise reduction
 
Don't forget that the process of printing or editing for suitable display online will remove/hide much of the noise even before you undertake any noise reduction in editing. So you won't see as much as when you're viewing it at 100% in the tools for adjusting noise and sharpness.

Noise removal and sharpness retention are two halves of the same circle in editing and there is a legion of different programs for each and differing methods that you can use to maximise your gains and minimise your losses. At a basic level you can use layer masks so that you can define where the strongest noise reduction and strongest sharpening occur; since you typically won't want to bother with sharpening your blurry background areas; and similarly won't want as strong a noise reduction on your crisp sharpest areas.

From there there are some layer masking tools you can use that can let you pick out the sharp/soft areas and generate layermasks that will go into fine detail (as opposed to manually brushing where you want each). Google and searching can result in a few good articles (I'd link them but I've missplaced the one or two I knew of/used).
 
ISO 1,600 is VERY usable on better full-frame cameras. At least as far as in people photography, where expression and emotion are paramount. No, it is not as "clean: as ISO 100 or 125 or 160, but it is not "terrible". If the exposures are generous, not wayyyy under-exposed, then ISO 1,600 is going to create decent images, especially if there is ample light present.

Many,many times, people resort to ISO 1,600 and then under-expose, at say an effective Exposure Index level of say 3,200 or 6,400 or worse, and it looks likerubbish! But if you have the ISO set high, AND you expose adequately and there is actually LIGHT present, 1,600 on a 5D Mark III is very useable.

I dunno...cleaning up noise and removing detail is also sort of subjective; what one person calls good, or acceptable, or bad--that all depends on the individual! to ME, agai, to ME, sharpness is accentuated with the noise left IN the image!!! I would rather see more high-frequency detail along with noise,m than no noise, and a loss of high-frequency detail! I am not a big fan of killing noise to the point that more than 15 to 20 percent of detail is lost; to me, again, I prefer to see the noise and to see more detail, to less noise and less fine detail!


I think this exactly is the point I was missing in a 5D mark III borrowed.

"But if you have the ISO set high, AND you expose adequately and there is actually LIGHT present, 1,600 on a 5D Mark III is very useable."

My exposure was less and I had cranked ISO high. When I looked the image on my computer, I was so disappointed by the noise. Now I know the key, I will practice this!

Thanks a ton, Derrel!
 
If you could show us a crop from the photo of the noise at fullsize that might also help. Noise and sharpness are one of those areas where you can hold a conversation with someone about it and yet be talking about totally different amounts of each without realising. With a real example we can better understand your position and what you're seeing.

What you see as too much might be well within normal boundaries; it could be easily fixable with the right method or could be insane levels of noise .
 
If you could show us a crop from the photo of the noise at fullsize that might also help. Noise and sharpness are one of those areas where you can hold a conversation with someone about it and yet be talking about totally different amounts of each without realising. With a real example we can better understand your position and what you're seeing.

What you see as too much might be well within normal boundaries; it could be easily fixable with the right method or could be insane levels of noise .

Thanks, Overread. I will post a pic. in some time here. I am away from my home now.
 
I don't mind noise in my photos as long as it's not so much that it becomes a distraction. If you do want to use software to decrease noise, I like the Topaz Labs filter Topaz DeNoise. Really effective.
 
How effectively noise can be reduced post process depends on the dominant type of noise in an image.

Because of the way digital cameras work darker regions will contain more noise than the brighter regions, so noise varies within an individual image.
Consequently we don't need to reduce noise equally to an entire image - a global edit - because reducing noise locally in the image gives us a better result.

The noise reduction panel in ACR lets us reduce the Luminance of noise and/or the Color of noise while also allowing us to adjust the detail of each adjustment. Further we can adjust the contrast of the Luminance adjustment & the smoothness of the Color adjustment.

While ACR usually suffucues for me I sometimes us Imagenomic's Noiseware Professional to edit image noise
 
ISO 1,600 is VERY usable on better full-frame cameras. At least as far as in people photography, where expression and emotion are paramount. No, it is not as "clean: as ISO 100 or 125 or 160, but it is not "terrible". If the exposures are generous, not wayyyy under-exposed, then ISO 1,600 is going to create decent images, especially if there is ample light present.

Many,many times, people resort to ISO 1,600 and then under-expose, at say an effective Exposure Index level of say 3,200 or 6,400 or worse, and it looks likerubbish! But if you have the ISO set high, AND you expose adequately and there is actually LIGHT present, 1,600 on a 5D Mark III is very useable.

I dunno...cleaning up noise and removing detail is also sort of subjective; what one person calls good, or acceptable, or bad--that all depends on the individual! to ME, agai, to ME, sharpness is accentuated with the noise left IN the image!!! I would rather see more high-frequency detail along with noise,m than no noise, and a loss of high-frequency detail! I am not a big fan of killing noise to the point that more than 15 to 20 percent of detail is lost; to me, again, I prefer to see the noise and to see more detail, to less noise and less fine detail!


I think this exactly is the point I was missing in a 5D mark III borrowed.

"But if you have the ISO set high, AND you expose adequately and there is actually LIGHT present, 1,600 on a 5D Mark III is very useable."

My exposure was less and I had cranked ISO high. When I looked the image on my computer, I was so disappointed by the noise. Now I know the key, I will practice this!

Thanks a ton, Derrel!

Good that you caught this: "Many,many times, people resort to ISO 1,600 and then under-expose, at say an effective Exposure Index level of say 3,200 or 6,400 or worse, and it looks like rubbish! But if you have the ISO set high, AND you expose adequately and there is actually LIGHT present, 1,600 on a 5D Mark III is very useable." I'm going to re-emphasize what Derrel said here. This is the key! If you're going to raise the ISO then raise it as far as needed. The worst thing you can do is be afraid to raise the ISO and so hold back and as a result underexpose at the lower ISO -- huge, huge, HUGE mistake.

Here's ISO 12,800 with an APS class sensor (Fuji X-T2). By the time the image is down-sampled (2048 pixels in this case) and filtered (lightly using Neat Image) it's completely serviceable. To illustrate the filtering issue I inset a box over the image with the unfiltered version inside the box. Noise filtering for the overall image is light because detail is more important.

Joe

high_ISO.jpg
 
I would love to be able to shoot at ISO1600 for my football games at night. That being said, I use a crop sensor 7D mk II and will shoot with ISO up to 6400. Most of the time, I just use LR to process these images and only use the sharpening and noise reduction in the details panel. My go to settings for that are Sharpening 60-70 and NR of 30-40. Here is an image taken at ISO2500 at f/3.2 1/1250, where I used 70 and 30 for sharpening and nr. I was probably 15 yards away with a 70-200mm f/2.8 at 105mm.

36945192966_05e75c801d_b.jpg
 

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