Help requested

[dan_bgblue]

I am not pleased with the results I got today with the S5. What did I do wrong. The images are more grainy than I would have expected. Image has been cropped to edit out stuff, and bring the grandkids up in the pic.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v687/dan_bgblue/IMG_1506.jpg

If you can not see the data you want to see about the pic, I will try to figure out how to share it. Photo stored on pc in picasa and uploaded to photobucket.

Thanks

[JustShootin']

They don't see extremely grainy to me, at least on my monitor. I did notice your ISO was set on 200. If at all possible, you should use ISO 80 or 100 with this camera, as compact cameras start to show grain/noise, even at 200 ISO.

[dan_bgblue]

Thanks. The lighting situation would certainly have allowed for an ISO of 80, but you know how quickly kids move and I wanted to be able to freeze the movement and used a shutter speed of 1/500th and I just thought ISO 200 would allow for better pics.

Still learning the digital world. Thanks again

[jr_senator]

As a general rule of thumb, I don't like going past ISO 200 with my smaller cameras.

[CameraLens]

I think if you simply add some sharpening it will help.

http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/8671/img1506k.jpg

You can very well use higher ISO's with some noise reduction software. Here's a thread I started about ISO 800 and 1600 with a point-and-shoot (P & S) camera:

http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/8671/img1506k.jpg

[jr_senator]

And a bit of dodging to the faces.

[dan_bgblue]

CameraLens, I agree that the PP did help the overall picture, but it made the hair of the mother on the left look bad to me.

jr_senator, what "dodging" did you do to the faces?

thanks folks

[jr_senator]

'Dodging' or 'to dodge' is a technique used in a wet lab. One would block a portion of print from the enlarger's light. That area would not receive as much light as the other areas of the print and therefore would not darken as much as the rest of the print.

Of course to dodge in the digital darkroom is to lighten an area. I use Photo Shop which has a large number of tools to edit a picture. You would need some kind of photo editing program to be able to do this. Adobe's Photo Shop is a large program and it takes someone advanced to use it to it's abilities. It's also expensive and works best on a computer with a lot of RAM. Photo Shop Elements is a downsized version and will do most of what big brother does and costs much less. There are other programs from Coral and others that are somewhat similar that are also good. If you never used an editing program you can download Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/downloads/) which is free and not a bad little program in it's own right.

BTW, the opposite of dodging is 'burn' or 'to burn in'.

[tgelston]

Thanks. The lighting situation would certainly have allowed for an ISO of 80, but you know how quickly kids move and I wanted to be able to freeze the movement and used a shutter speed of 1/500th and I just thought ISO 200 would allow for better pics.

You will still be able to freeze kid movement at 1/250 and even 1/125 w/o any blur so you could probably drop to the lower ISO and still be fine.

I have to say I am not crazy about the sharpened version - maybe a touch less and bump up saturation just a little too.

Cute kids!