What noise is acceptable?

maninsuitcase

maninsuitcase

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Chris
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At what point is noise no longer acceptable?

After maxing my ISO (1600) this evening I was expecting a world of noise that never really showed once in lightroom. With a few slider tweaks it was easily as good or better as ISO 800 which I normally don't bother fixing.

I have added a 100% crop with LR default noise reduction, which I wouldn't consider to be very strong, and suspect shooting jpeg give similar results.

I think that this image is perfectly acceptable, there's no big clumps of colour no nasty course grain. Just a small loss of detail.

DSC_0012-3.jpg


Am I too relaxed on noise? Will printing my images reveal this noise or hide it further? I know a good exposure is key here.


I realise the image is soft, ISO1600 and I still couldn't get a fast enough shutter.
 
Noise in and of itself has never bothered me in the slightest. The issue I have is that as noise increases in my camera (400D) the image loses clarity. Beyond 400 ISO I can't get a sharp image really (as in properly sharp, still probably acceptable for a print, just not at 100% on the monitor).
 
I've recently had to seriously consider noise reduction for submitting to Alamy and during the course of this have found a big difference in the quality of my images. I still have room for learning and improvement but feel this step in PP should not be discounted.
 
maninsuitcase said:
Am I too relaxed on noise? Will printing my images reveal this noise or hide it further? I know a good exposure is key here.


I realise the image is soft, ISO1600 and I still couldn't get a fast enough shutter.
Click to expand...


You'll never see noise from that shot in print, I have had far far worse printed and they all come out fine.
What you see when pixel peeping at 100% on a 28" screen is not the same as what you see in a 10X 8 print.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
whiteflyer said:
You'll never see noise from that shot in print, I have had far far worse printed and they all come out fine.
What you see when pixel peeping at 100% on a 28" screen is not the same as what you see in a 10X 8 print.
Click to expand...

Very true.
 
whiteflyer said:
You'll never see noise from that shot in print, I have had far far worse printed and they all come out fine.
What you see when pixel peeping at 100% on a 28" screen is not the same as what you see in a 10X 8 print.
Click to expand...

Agreed. One reason I downgraded from a D700 to D7000 is I realised noise is basically a non-issue on print, but resolution is.
 
So as is often the case it's probably a pixel peeper issue then? ISO1600 (so long as I get a good exposure) will be fine then. I'd rather a bit of a noisy image then a blurry one. Once I resize for web or print it sounds like I'm not really going to see a problem.
 
Just expose the the right. Noise is mainly an issue in underexposed shots.
 
A lot depends on the image and how you are going to use it.

For a high quality commercial image, any imperfection such as noise is unacceptable.

More importantly if you show a client 2 images side by side of exactly the same shot one shot at high ISO and one shot low ISO and ask them which they prefer, its obvious what they go for.

When you are competing against other photographers, you need to have the better image. Its just simple.

Of course in some cases high ISO is unavoidable, but there are many, many occasions where the lesser skilled / experienced or under equipped photographer will shoot high ISO when they could have shot it low.

Paul.
www.photographybyriddell.co.uk
 
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