rough noise - RAW

[mentos_007]

Today I took a few pictures in RAW. Then I opened them in PS and exported as jpeg without any improvements and what did I saw? Extremely rough noise!
a sample (full size 1,22 MB) you can find here: http://www.mentos.lnet.szn.pl/dscf0334.jpg .

actuall when I run NeatImage (for noise rduction) it turned out fine, but sometimes NeatImage is useless especially when there's water in the shot...
so you RAW masters... can you telll me why there's so much noise in my RAW pics? I use Fuji s5000

 

[j_mcquillen]

What ISO were you shooting at?

 

[Mohain]

The Exif says 200 ASA.

Mentos, RAW images are just the raw data capture from the sensors and have had no post processing applies to them. If you shoot to JPEG the camera applied some post processing, including noise reduction some colour correction and image compression in camera. The beauty of RAW processing on the computer is that you have control over these things yourself. However, this does seem VERY noisy to me. I assume you are using the ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) plug-in for Photoshop? What version? Some thing to check:

1. Was the image underexposed? The histogram looks OK but I don't know if ACR is auto adjusting the exposure. I use a Fuji s9500 and it is bad for noise if underexposed. It's usually best to slightly over expose (without blowing out your highlights) and adjust the exposure down in ACR.

2. Do you have sharpening on in ACR? Check the 'details' tab and slide the 'sharpening' slider all the way to the left. It's always best to apply sharpening right at the end of your workflow (after you have finished all other processing and resized etc). If you've got a noisy image the sharpening in ACR will just exaggerate the noise.

3. You can apply a little bit of colour noise reduction in ACR. I keep it at 25% and it seems to be OK don't go to mad with it tho. Neat image or Noiseware are much better at handling noise and ACR noise reduction can introduce artifacts if you use it to much.

4. Does the version of ACR you are using support your camera? You may find that even tho your images open OK, the program might not actually support your camera model. I found this with the s9500. I could use ACR to process my RAW images but the noise was terrible. When Adobe updated ACR to 3.3 it offically supported the s9500 and hey-presto! clean images!

Think that's it. Hope this helps?

Cheers,

Mohain.