Noise

[Nu2this]

I have been having a problem with a lot of noise in my pictures. When I view them at 100% there is very noticable noise and the pictures just aren't as clean as they should be. Smaller prints come out ok but if I crop and enlarge the image I'm not happy with them. I shot some the other day and they ranged from 100 ISO to 800 ISO, and there was noise in all of them. My gear is- Canon Rebel XTi, Canon 24-70 f2.8, and Canon 70-200 f2.8L, mostly shoot in M mode, and switch back a forth between auto and manual focus, hand held. I have shot nearly 2800 pictures with this set up and I'm not getting nearly as good of pictures as what I see on here. Not sure what the problem is. Is it me, wrong camera set up, defective equipment, bad CF cards (use Sandisk Extreme II) or something else? Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[RTMiller]

Post some samples.

[Nu2this]

I knew that one was coming. Not set up to do that at work but will see if I have time this evening.

[gjl711]

Yup, can’t say much without a sample. Odds are though that you’re underexposing a bit when you take the pic and boosting it a bit to compensate in PP. This will increase noise and sometimes quite a bit depending on how much your pushing the pic.

[Dermit]

Impossible to advise without samples. What is considered noisey to one person might be considered just fine to another.

[kevin_c]

How do they look printed or when viewed at 'normal' sizes - It's too easy to pixel-peep at 100% (and higher) with digital... :-)

In my experience most so called 'noisy' images look fine when printed or reduced for viewing on a screen.

[DC Fan]

If you're worried about noise, get noise reduction software. Noise Ninja (http://www.picturecode.com/) and Noiseware (http://www.imagenomic.com/index.aspx) are among the best-known examples of these programs and both have trial downloads available.

Be aware that even the best exposures from the best cameras can appear to have noise, especially in dark "shadow" areas, if the image's dynamic range is wide enough.

[Nu2this]

I won't have time to send samples tonight, don't have them loaded to a website yet. I played around with a couple of them and it seems that they show more noise in the "fit to screen" view than in 100% view. If I backed the sharpening all the way to 0 they didn't show much noise at all. The pictures we had printed came out fine, but they are all 4x6 for now. I'll do a little more playing with some of my older pictures with different colors, ranges, etc. and see what I actually have before going any further. As a side note, the only PP software I have right now is Canon's DPP, looking at getting Photoshop Elements very soon. I'll re-post with pictures once I've gone a little further.

[smorter]

I think I know the problem you're experiencing, it's the DPP sharpening that's causing all those bits of black and white dots all over your images (some people call this "snow" because it looks like white and black grain crap all over the picture). It's because RAW files have had no Noise reduction applied, so when DPP sharpens it, the noise is being sharpened hence it looks way worse than it is.

What you need to do is take sharpening to zero, activate the NR (I often use 2 luminance, and 1 chroma), and then sharpen (I usually go 1 or 2 max in DPP, and sharpen in PS instead if needed)

Also expose to the right of the histogram and then throttle back in DPP, this will help avoid noise and give you clean results

You will notice that JPGs don't look crazy like that, only RAW files you're putting through to DPP.

[seaside]

If both your Canon zooms exhibit high noise I'd suspect your camera or camera settings. Shooting properly exposed images at 100 ISO should be noise free!

[DDCSD]

Easiest fix, stop viewing at 100% and don't crop so aggressively.. :)