noise

[Ecas32]

its a rainy day, but i thought i would shoot anyway.
since it was overcast, it was a little dark outside. to compensate, i pumped up the ISO to 1600. would it be possible to get more noise out of this photo? i already ran it through a noise reducer in the canon software.

1/400 5.6

 

[AlexColeman]

Email me the original, I can do it for you.
alexcoleman3644 at gmail.com

 

[inTempus]

 

[Big Mike]

Noise also has a lot to do with exposure and processing. If you overexpose the shot (not too much) you can reduce the amount of noise. It's known as exposing to the right.

 

[inTempus]

+1 to what Mike said.

I've found that if you nail your exposure, or over expose just a little, you reduce the chroma noise (the colored dots you see in the dark areas) quite a bit. The rest you can clean up with something like Noise Ninja. I would say Noise Ninja is more useful than the Canon supplied software. You can also try Noiseware. It's good to have such tools on your system to use in your post processing for those times you're forced to use high ISO.

 

[Ecas32]

wow tharmsen! that looks great compared to my original.
so did u just run it through noise nija or w/e you were talkin about?

 

[inTempus]

wow tharmsen! that looks great compared to my original.
so did u just run it through noise nija or w/e you were talkin about?

Yes, I used NoiseNinja - I'm glad you liked it. Here's the link: Noise Ninja: The gold standard for image noise reduction

I filtered the entire image then removed most of the filtering just from the bird (as filtering reduces detail).

It's a pretty easy tool to use.

 

[Samanax]

ISO - 1600
Aperture - f/5.6
Shutter Speed - 1/400

Looking at your exposure settings I see you could have gone with a lower ISO setting (ISO 800 or even ISO 400) and the shutter speed would still have been fast enough and you would have gotten a picture with less noise in it.

 

[Ecas32]

ya i probably could have but i was scared to do it because i was free handed and shootin at 300 mm

 

[Samanax]

ya i probably could have but i was scared to do it because i was free handed and shootin at 300 mm

Oh, you were at 300mm (I forgot to check the exif)? Then you did the right thing by shooting at 1/400 (1/320 would have been the minimal shutter speed to use for that focal length) to keep the image fairly free of lens blur/camera shake. Do you have a good tripod? For long focal length lenses you almost always have to use a solid tripod to get a sharp image.

 

[Ecas32]

Yes I do have a tripod but I don't use it when I'm shooting birds because where ever I have it positioned it seems like they never land. And of course they won't stay there pong enough!

 

[Ecas32]

so with a special thanks to tharmsen, can i get some c&c?

 

[Samanax]

Besides the noise problem, the image is slightly OOF and a touch underexposed. The composition doesn't quite work for me...I would have liked to see the bird fill more of the frame and not centered vertically. The shallow DOF/background blur is nice.

 

[Early]

its a rainy day, but i thought i would shoot anyway.
since it was overcast, it was a little dark outside. to compensate, i pumped up the ISO to 1600. would it be possible to get more noise out of this photo? i already ran it through a noise reducer in the canon software.

1/400 5.6

At ISO 1600, that already pretty damned acceptable to me. Of course, I'm not viewing it at 100%, am I? Still...

 

[Ecas32]

Besides the noise problem, the image is slightly OOF and a touch underexposed. The composition doesn't quite work for me...I would have liked to see the bird fill more of the frame and not centered vertically. The shallow DOF/background blur is nice.

ya i wanted to crop it more and get the bird to fill more of the frame, but like you said, it was slightly out of focus so i couldnt.