Sharper night photos

[jonnybaz]

Hello fellow photographers! I use a Nikon Coolpix P1000. Excellent camera in many cases but it has a small sensor and it suffers in night time. I took a tripod to improve the situation a bit. I'll show you a photo I took in a square. I shot in manual mode but practically I used it as if I were in shutter priority mode. Both four images were shot in f8 and 4,3 mm focal length. In three of them the ISO was 100. The fourth was in ISO400. What I changed was the exposure times. The first was 1sec, the second was at 3 seconds, the third was at 4 seconds and the one with ISO 400 was at half a second. Although the light ranges from image to image, what I didn't accomplish was to make the faces of the people to be sharp and to be able to distinguish some details on them. Has this to do with the small sensor of the camera or there is some technique I can use to make their faces clearer? The camera shoots at 16MPs.

 

[ac12]

I see no pictures.

Subject movement.
It is hard for a person to hold still for a one second exposure. The longer the exposure, the worse it gets.

 

[jonnybaz]

I see no pictures.

Subject movement.
It is hard for a person to hold still for a one second exposure. The longer the exposure, the worse it gets.

My jpegs were too big (approximately 6MB each). So I made a tiny rise on the luminosity of 2% in Google photos to save them as copies with size of ~2MB so that I can uploaded them. I know it's too much time for handheld. I used a tripod. Apart from the "ghosting" of people which is something that bothers me, my main concern is the lack of detail in people faces. Any suggestions?

 

[ac12]

For people, even if they are posing for you, you need to get your shutter speed UP.
Since you are shooting candid type pic, you need even faster, cuz the random people will be moving.

Look at the bicycles the compare the bikes to the people.
What you see in the peoples faces is motion blur, from shooting at too slow a shutter speed.

RAISE your ISO level as high as you need to, to get at least 1/60 sec.

Again look at the bikes. The level of detail in the bikes is as much as you can get, at those ISO levels. If the bike is not clear enough to show details, the faces will not be any better. That is a limitation of the sensor at a particular ISO level.
Yes, a small sensor has a limited resolution, so you cannot see "tiny" details in the image.

 

[jonnybaz]

For people, even if they are posing for you, you need to get your shutter speed UP.
Since you are shooting candid type pic, you need even faster, cuz the random people will be moving.

Look at the bicycles the compare the bikes to the people.
What you see in the peoples faces is motion blur, from shooting at too slow a shutter speed.

RAISE your ISO level as high as you need to, to get at least 1/60 sec.

Again look at the bikes. The level of detail in the bikes is as much as you can get, at those ISO levels. If the bike is not clear enough to show details, the faces will not be any better. That is a limitation of the sensor at a particular ISO level.
Yes, a small sensor has a limited resolution, so you cannot see "tiny" details in the image.

Yes. You are right. If I raise my ISO I can make the ghosting disappear by going faster but at the same time I will introduce grain and probably loose detail on the faces. So I'm in a dead end. Sensor limitations. Tomorrow I will go to the same scene to see if there is a more appropriate combination of ISO/shutter speed that will give me a little bit more detail. Without the ghosting. Maybe at ISO 800 with a faster speed. But not so optimistic. Tell me something if you know; If I combine different shots in various ISO's in post processing. And use something like the magic eraser tool of Google Pixel 6. Is it possible to "reconstruct" the detail in people faces and erase unwanted "ghost people" at the same time? I shoot in RAW so perhaps I can save a jpeg in "printable" size and resolution. Is this possible or I need simply a bigger sensor?

 

[jonnybaz]

I mean by overlay to remake the picture. Is it possible that?

 

[ac12]

You can use a RAW noise removing program. BUT, some of those programs require a graphics co-processor $$$.
I've been surprised at what some of those programs can do.

I think there are programs that will let you layer multiple shots, to reduce noise.
BUT, it has to be a STATIC scene. If there is subject movement between the shots, the subject will be blurred.

You can edit out the "ghost people." How easy that is depends on the program you use.

But there are limits to what you can do.
- You only have X resolution. You CANNOT get more detail than you have camera resolution to support.
If the face is only a few pixels wide, there isn't enough pixels to "reconstruct" the face. The face has to be large enough to have enough pixels to work with.
If the eye is only one pixel, all you have is a small square/dot for the eye. You cannot reconstruct the eye.
- There are limits to what YOUR camera can do, both sensor and lens. This is why shooting in low light is expensive; a camera with HIGH ISO and a FAST lens.

 

[wfooshee]

No human being, nor pretty much any warm-blooded animal, can actually remain perfectly motionless for a full second, much less longer. Just breathing during the exposure moves their face.

 

[ac12]

No human being, nor pretty much any warm-blooded animal, can actually remain perfectly motionless for a full second, much less longer. Just breathing during the exposure moves their face.

Well some of the "old" pics from the 1800s were LONG exposure.
But to do that it was a pose, where they could prepare to be STILL, not candids where as you said, people move.