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CHoffman
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« on: October 03, 2019, 12:22:53 AM » |
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My D200 is an antique and hopefully I can upgrade soon. In the meantime, no matter what I do with the RAW preferences, my noise levels are way higher than the jpegs produced in the camera. The noise looks like multicolored cottage cheese, mostly visible in darker areas, but it's really everywhere. The jpegs will be almost perfectly smooth. Even going into the image editor I can't get the noise that low without losing detail. Any hints for settings to try or where I could be screwing up?
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admin
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« Reply #1 on: October 03, 2019, 01:49:49 PM » |
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The JPG will always do better because the camera has a noise profile for the sensor that it can use when processing the JPG. In high ISO images with a lot of noise, I've been able to get close to the noise reduction of JPG images using the chroma noise option in the editor. When noise levels are not so high, it is possible to even do better and retain more sharpness than the JPG but at very high noise levels, it's hard to beat the processing that is done when the camera creates a JPG.
Regards,
Mike
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CHoffman
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« Reply #2 on: October 03, 2019, 02:06:31 PM » |
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The chroma filter is definitely the most effective on the type of noise I've got, but also the most damaging to sharpness/detail. Does it have any settings for how much is applied beyond regular and heavy? The "old girl" has served me well, but I think a camera upgrade is in the very near future (he says, looking at his watch.)
edit- I just found I can fix much of the loss of sharpness with DFS. I've always kept any sort of sharpening to a minimum, but up at 400-500%, higher than I've ever used, things improve greatly.
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« Last Edit: October 03, 2019, 02:28:55 PM by CHoffman »
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MelW
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« Reply #3 on: October 03, 2019, 03:10:41 PM » |
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I still have - and still occasionally use my D200. I really love it in so many ways, and if I can shoot at ISO 100, it can't be beat. But I have almost never been able to use the raw images. Of course raw data is less responsive to ISO settings, but I find that even as low as ISO 200, I have at least some of the same noise symptoms described here in raw images. I have never tried sharpening that high but maybe I'll go back and look at some of my old images and give that a whirl when I use the high chroma noise reduction. BTW, my D500 does quite nicely with noise all the way up to ISO 6400 (except for some extremely low light situations)
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CHoffman
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« Reply #4 on: October 04, 2019, 04:01:02 AM » |
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Thanks- it's useful to know what I'm seeing is normal.
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CHoffman
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« Reply #5 on: October 14, 2019, 04:38:09 PM » |
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After much deliberation, I upgraded to a Nikon Z6. It was the only thing that "checked the box" for the many things I need to do. As an old school curmudgeon, I didn't think an EVF was going to cut it for me, but the more I use it, the more I like it. Things are vastly improved in terms of image quality and noise! That said, I'm still having trouble justifying the use of raw files at all, given the storage requirements and the excellent quality of the jpegs right out of the camera.
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MelW
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« Reply #6 on: October 15, 2019, 01:26:37 AM » |
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My experience with my D500, D600, and Sony A6000 mirrorless is that out of the camera Jpegs are great about 2/3 of the time - and for reasons that Mike summarized nicely, better than anything that I can do with raw. But there are ways in which - at times - I know that I am not such a good photographer, both technically and aesthetically. For example, I have an uncanny knack for blowing out highlights, even in what should be a nicely and uniformly lit scene. That's where the QU raw processing really comes to the rescue. Especially blown facial highlights - I can almost always recover them - and then - if needed - with the proper tweaking of the HDR slider (this takes some practice) get way more out of the photo than what was in the jpeg. Another situation is really low light - where even at ISO 6400, the jpegs are well underexposed (like my granddaughter's dance recitals with constantly changing colors/light levels), Here again, the only way I can get an acceptable image is from the raw - I say acceptable - but sometimes even good. There are other situations as well where I just get finer gradation/ tonality from the raw processing even when I haven't committed one of my usual screw-ups. My suggestion is to continue to shoot both raw and jpeg for a while and see what works best for you.
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