lotta noise at 800 on new 7D

[crockny]

1) One of the reasons that impelled me to get the 7D was its promise of less noise at high ISO's ... I'm shooting RAW -- I seem to have more noise than I had with my Rebel Xsi! I already made the adjustment in the camera for "noise reduction at high ISO" ... what gives?

2) Is there any downside to raising the luminance and color sliders up to 100 in Camera RAW to reduce noise?

[OsmosisStudios]

Examples would be VERY helpful. With Noise, if you're underexposed, or looking at shadow areas, you're going to see it more.

[tinusvdb]

I have also been wondering about the noise at high ISO settings. ISO 400 seems to be MAX I can go without noise.....

Noisy Butterflies

[crockny]

I wasn't sure how to show a CR2 so I saved it as a jpeg without adjusting anything in RAW:



Camera Canon EOS 7D
Exposure 0.001 sec (1/2000)
Aperture f/8.0
Focal Length 168 mm
ISO Speed 800

I would be cropping a picture like this quite a bit ...

[dakwegmo]

At this resolution it looks fine to me. You might need to share the full resolution image on Flickr, or post a 100% crop of a problem area.

[inkista]

Originally Posted by crockny

1) One of the reasons that impelled me to get the 7D was its promise of less noise at high ISO's ... I'm shooting RAW -- I seem to have more noise than I had with my Rebel Xsi! I already made the adjustment in the camera for "noise reduction at high ISO" ... what gives?

You're spending too much time looking at things at 100% crop (or larger), and you're mistaken pixel patterns for noise?

2) Is there any downside to raising the luminance and color sliders up to 100 in Camera RAW to reduce noise?

Yes. You'll take a hit on sharpness.

Noise reduction and sharpening are kind of antithetical to each other, processing-wise. One is smearing pixels together, while the other is trying to separate them out.

[TerryL]

Originally Posted by inkista

You're spending too much time looking at things at 100% crop (or larger), and you're mistaken pixel patterns for noise?


Yes. You'll take a hit on sharpness.

Noise reduction and sharpening are kind of antithetical to each other, processing-wise. One is smearing pixels together, while the other is trying to separate them out.

Think he is right X2 here

[crockny]

I will post a crop. I think I'm looking at noise since the luminance slider reduces/eliminates it ... it's most noticable in backgrounds such as sky or water which I have a lot of since I'm shooting birds.

Don't people do both noise reduction and sharpening? I do sharpening at end via high pass ...

[ElCapitan]

Given that image you shared. I see no problems. Don't become a slave to worrying about noise. It is going to happen. The trick is learning to control it and realizing that is doesn't always detract from an image. I can't tell from that image, but some noise at the mid range ISO's tends to look more like natural grain for me. It's only when shooting at 3200-6400 in poor lighting that I get the green and orange noise showing up, but only mainly in the shadows. Anything lit and exposed well can still look goof between 3200-4000, and I have even managed to get some nice looking shots at concerts shooting at 6400

My advice would be to learn how to use layer masking. It has become one of my best friends in getting rid of background noise but keeping the subject sharp. There 2 ways you can go about doing this. One is creating 2 separate psd or jpg files from the same raw. One is setup for the subject in mind (making it sharp and look good), and the other is for setting up the background (getting rid of the noise while still keeping it look good). Align the images in PS (I usually make the noise reduced background the top layer), and make the top layer a layer mask and erase the subject in the top layer. It might require a little time and finessing, but you end up with a sharp subject and a clean background.

The other way is to just make one psd or jpg out of the raw image, and then duplicate the background layer and use PS noise reduction. Gaussian blur I find also does a good job of reducing background noise, but don't use too much. I'd also recommend using this technique when the noise is atrocious, as I find LR/PS RAW does a good job of reducing noise while keeping the image relatively sharp at the lower to mid range ISO's.

[crockny]

Thanks for the tips -- I shot some birds (ha) at 1600 on a cloudy day and had mixed results -- of course the dark exposures were very noisy but the well exposed stuff was not so bad -- grainy like you said ... here's one after putting the luminance and color sliders up to about 50% and some little high pass sharpening in PS:



Camera Canon EOS 7D
Exposure 0.002 sec (1/500)
Aperture f/6.3
Focal Length 400 mm
ISO Speed 1600

Do you think this is over-sharpened?