Not exactly impressed with my 16 x 20 picture

[brian87gt]

I had a picture of my son playing hockey blown up to a 16 x 20 picture. The picture looks somewhat spotty, is it from the iso being set to high (was not bright in the rink), or does my camera not have enough mega pixels for a picture that size? It's a D60.
Here's the pic

 

[Samanax]

It's probably noise from high ISO and low/poor lighting conditions.

 

[Kegger]

Looks like noise to me. You know what ISO it was set at?

 

[hankejp]

I would say noise here too. Doesn't look very pixelated to me.

 

[brian87gt]

Looks like noise to me. You know what ISO it was set at?

Pretty sure it was either 1600 or high.

 

[Dubious Drewski]

Yeah this image is a bit noisy, but noise isn't the reason your print didn't look good. In print form, noise is actually very hard to notice. What this picture really needs is some basic post production to bring out the colours and whites.

Here's what I got after upping the saturation, brightening with levels and removing a bit of noise:

 

[TheSon]

The reason is because your ISO is set at 3200. That is waaayyy too high to blow it up and expect it to look perfect...

 

[Dubious Drewski]

This shot was taken at 1/500th, F5.6 and ISO 3200. You could have gotten away with 1/250th and ISO 1600, but I will say this again: Noise doesn't matter as much in print form. Even if you see lots of noise on your computer screen, the print will look much cleaner. That's just the nature of it.

The reason you weren't happy with your image was because the lighting was poor in that rink, your lens didn't give you a very sharp image, and you have done no post production on it. Believe me, I've shot a ton of weddings at ISO 3200, scared that the noisy images were going to be garbage, but then pleasantly surprised at the tonal quality of the 8x10s.

 

[dxqcanada]

Imagenomic NoiseWare (or other noise reduction software) will do a fairly good job of cleaning up the noise.

You should try the free version.

Then do some tweaking as suggested by others.

 

[AlexColeman]

If you send me the full size, I could do some work and email it back.
alexcoleman3644 at gmail.com

 

[Mgw189]

What was the DPI setting of the file you sent to have printed. For future reference make sure it is around 300 or so to get the best print quality. Yes ISO noise will still show up if you dont process it out.

 

[seward93]

i just downloaded noiseware and messed around with the photo for about 1 minute.

thoughts?

 

[brian87gt]

i just downloaded noiseware and messed around with the photo for about 1 minute.

thoughts?

I can tell a big difference, but I don't really understand what noise is, so I don't know what to mess with.Thanks

 

[AlexColeman]

Yeah, but there it is burnt out, overexposed or just undersaturated, the first one is better.

 

[dxqcanada]

I think the point of the last image was reduction of noise ... and the capabilities of Noiseware.

Now it needs some adjustments for colour, brightness, and contrast.