Is in-camera noise reduction a good idea?

[drr0b]

Hi,

I've been wondering about in-camera noise reduction recently. Two things in particular:

1) Is the noise reduction applied to RAW images

2) Can the noise reduction in-camera be reproduced post-production?

Putting this all together: is it better to leave in-camera noise reduction off, and deal with it all PP, to get the optimum balance between information and noise for each image, or does the in-camera noise reduction perform a valuable service that cannot be replicated?

Thanks in advance for your advice

[teaking]

RAW has no noise reduction it is all applied in PP so if shooting RAW it doesnt matter.

If shooting JPEG then it depends on your shooting and PP habit alot of the new cameras provide good noise reduction specific to that camera it can be achieve in software but thats more button presses and it can take longer actually running the reduction process than it takes in camera. How ever it can come at a price where you loose detail from a picture so just take a few snaps find out where you draw the line and set the noise reduction to that point. Or if preferred leave it off

[Doug Pardee]

Originally Posted by teaking

RAW has no noise reduction

This is not necessarily true. Some camera models are applying noise reduction on the sensor. See this article: http://www.dxomark.com/index.php/eng...alf-cooked-RAW

[teaking]

drr0b - That is true RAW is not unaltered data it passes through an analogue to digital converter and like a lot of conversions some data is lost or rounded up or down. There can be corrective noise reduction applied to RAW data in this process to so I guess RAW can have noise reduction applied. I would consider it more corrective though and still suggest most of the noise reduction would be done in PP although its something to bear in mind

[drr0b]

Hi teaking and Doug, thanks for your helpful answers. I mainly shoot in RAW, so it's good to know I have such control. I am now going to experiment with RAW+JPG shots with IS0 3200 and strong noise reduction to see the difference