just a snapshot, but why so noisy?

[katia]

EXIF:
f/5
1/100
ISO-200

i used my SB-600.

this is not a portrait or anything, just a drunken snapshot. it seems REALLY noisy to me though! there is a before and after in the attachments. did i go too far with the noise reduction? they don't look "gaussain blurred to all hell" like the myspace girls, but they definitely look smoother.

i only shoot RAW, opened in ACR and adjusted exposure, opened in Photoshop, cloned out that shitty job the painters did, reduced noise, batch saved as JPEG

[Doug Sundseth]

I'm not seeing significant noise in the photos you attached. This might be an effect of the limited size of the photos.

That said, if you're not planning to print large, I don't see a problem here. (FWIW, I find that I sometimes pay too much attention to a 100% view of an image when I'll never be seeing the picture at that enlargement anywhere but on my monitor during post-processing.)

[ArmySoldier777]

I'm a pixel peeper. I hate it, but I'll admit it lol. So I know what you mean about thinking there's too much noise. But in order to reduce the noise on the overall image, you're right, it does smooth things out a bit.

Here's a suggestion that I use sometimes:

1) Do a light or medium noise reduction to the whole image until the 2 subjects look good without being smoothed "ignore their surroundings".
2) Mask the 2 subjects
3) Apply a more intense noise reduction to everything around them until you get the effect you want.

This technique has worked pretty well for me in the past on photos that I was concerned about. It allows you to be more liberal with noise reduction on the things that don't matter, while maintaining the detail on your subject.

I have the same problem Doug. I look at 100%, and I'll admit, sometimes up to 200% way too often trying to be a perfectionist on something that nobody else will ever be able to notice. But then again, when I'm not editing 100's or 1000's of photos, I enjoy the post production process so I don't mind taking that extra time


David

[katia]

most of the noise that's bothering me is in the background, top-left corner.

does the 2nd look over-smoothed or can i get away with it?

[JFSanders]

I think you could eliminate that corner all together. Crop it down until their eyes fall on the right and left thirds. Set the verticals to vertical. Adjust your white balance to eliminate the blue cast and sharpen the image with a high pass at about 1 pixel and 30% opacity on just the luminance channel.

Jim

[OsmosisStudios]

The only issue I saw was the top left corner as you mentioned: thats a shadow area and noise is gonna be worse there than anywhere else in any image. Its a bit heavy, but not totally unheard of.

[katia]

thanks, Jim!

that is a better crop. however the 2nd version looks way too saturated with red. however i'm not working on a calibrated monitor, and i'm really struggling with it! damn laptop screen...

[JFSanders]

Originally Posted by katia

thanks, Jim!

that is a better crop. however the 2nd version looks way too saturated with red. however i'm not working on a calibrated monitor, and i'm really struggling with it! damn laptop screen...

Does the first version look like the skin tones are warm to you? If so you may want to go into your video options and see if your gamma is set to 2.2 that may be most of your problem with saturation and color rendition.

Jim

[ArmySoldier777]

On my screen it shows a nice warm saturation. Maybe a tiny bit on the red side, but I probably wouldn't have even noticed it if you hadn't mentioned red. It's been a long while since my monitor was calibrated, but mine's pretty close to print.

I hate working on laptop screens. They're almost always too bright, so you're photos are usually underexposed, and the colors never quite right


David

[ceremus]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

The only issue I saw was the top left corner as you mentioned: thats a shadow area and noise is gonna be worse there than anywhere else in any image. Its a bit heavy, but not totally unheard of.

Yeah, basically this. The area is a tad underexposed, and underexposure always increases noise to some degree. It is affecting the guy on the left a bit, but I think your correction in the second attached image alleviates the issue.