In camera noise reduction vs post processing

I do as little in camera as I can. I prefer to do everything post shooting.

noise depends on many factors. i personally shoot raw and edit in acr. i dont use photoshop itself unless i need to manipulate an image or mask in effects.
my personal findings is that you should edit in the dimensions that you intend to print. if youre printing a 4x6, the down size alone is enough to kill almost any noise situation.
also i find that any image with noise is best left unsharpened. sharpening exagerates noise. or if youre talented enough you can do some advanced sharpening tecniques with masking.

armis wrote in post #16725019
Done!

Done in ACR.
After that some sharping in photoshop, thats it.

Another point to consider is that by doing your NR in post, you can be selective as to where it is applied, as well as how much you apply. Noise is far more noticeable in areas of plain tone and is less noticeable in areas of fine detail, as the detail tends to mask it.

So, let's say you have a picture of a bird, with lovely sharp feather detail that you wish to retain, against an out of focus foliage background, which is essentially a soft green toned area, without any detail. The background may show significant noise but the bird much less. Do the NR yourself and you can keep it to the background, where you can be quite aggressive with it as there is no detail to lose, but run little or no NR on the bird itself and keep the sharpness in the essential details, where the noise doesn't really show anyway.

The same goes if the noise is only noticeable in a small part of the picture, where you have boosted the shadows by a couple of stops perhaps. You can just add some NR to the boosted area and not to the main parts of the image where the exposure was correct and didn't need increasing.

As with any adjustment (sharpening, contrast etc.) it is far more controllable doing it in post, when you can see a preview and tweak the settings until it is how you want it, than leytting the camera set a specific default level and baking it in to the jpeg.

Of course, this only really matters if you are shooting jpegs.

gonzogolf wrote in post #16701397
Not if you shoot .jpg. Any processing done in the camera to a .jpg is permanent. You can still do some processing to the file, but you are locked into the .jpg as a starting point, so any detail loss due to noise reduction cant be retrieved. Think of it like this. If you have all the ingredients for bread dough you can make pizza crust or a loaf of bread, thats the raw file. Okay so you roll the dough to make pizza crust, then change your mind and decide you want to make a loaf of bread, but it wont rise. Thats editing a .jpg file, your options are limited by what you allowed the camera to do.

But you can change WB to jpegs in Camera Raw. Load a raw file and make a preset of each wb setting and then you can use those presets to change the WB of any jpeg. So not everything you do to a jpeg in camera is permanent.

7D at 12,800. NR by ACR

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Shooting wrote in post #16726615
But you can change WB to jpegs in Camera Raw. Load a raw file and make a preset of each wb setting and then you can use those presets to change the WB of any jpeg. So not everything you do to a jpeg in camera is permanent.

You dont have the same range of adjustments to the .jpg You can simulate correcting white balance, but you are actually color correcting the .jpg.