Please tell me what to do about these speckles

[Dianthus]

I have a Kodak M863 camera and I decided to take a photo of these trees against the sunset sky while coming home from a day out with my friend this evening. I set the dial to SCN and "sunset light", rested the camera on the roof of her car and pressed the shutter.

When I uploaded the photo to my computer I found that it was ruined by all those speckles you can see. I also get speckles when taking photos indoors with flash - except that then they are all red instead of multicoloured. Can anyone tell me why they appear and how I can stop them?

I managed to remove them, but only by extensive post processing.

[brianxlt]

The speckles are digital noise caused by the sensor. I am not familiar with the Kodak camera you have, but I will assume it is small point and shot type and will not do very good with low light photography. The only way to remove this type and extent of image degradation is with heavy processing and noise reduction.

[ceremus]

Definitely noise. This is caused by the camera metering a very dark scene, and trying to compensate for it by increasing the sensor's ISO sensitivity.

If you look on page 32 of your manual you should be able to adjust your ISO settings manually. A lower value will make the sensor less sensitive to light, and decrease noise. A higher value will increase light sensitivity, and increase noise.

So, you should be able to reduce the noise of the image, whether or not you can capture very much of a night scene with so little light using a P&S camera is well, something you'll have to play with to find out.

[Dianthus]

Thanks for the replies . I'll try a few experiments and see what happens.