Is my 7D okay?

Have you got Highlight Tone Priority (HTP) disabled?

but the software profiles in most RAW convertors do a very good job of dealing with it without going through extra steps. Unless of course its a high iso file that needs additional noise reduction.

aximrocks wrote in post #14290398
Have you got Highlight Tone Priority (HTP) disabled?

The file is question is ISO 100. HTP limits low ISO to 200.

Tsmith wrote in post #14290410
but the software profiles in most RAW convertors do a very good job of dealing with it without going through extra steps. Unless of course its a high iso file that needs additional noise reduction.

That i have not ventured into. I've been using the (CS4)ACR's Standard Profile for the RAW conversion. Which ACR profile would you recommend to deal with this low-ISO noise from 7D during conversion?

The profiles in CS4 ACR are outdated but I suggest trying different ones to see if there is any difference. In CS5 and Lightroom 3 & 4 you have the option to use lens profiles that I've found to work great. They auto correct CA and distortion to an extent.

You're back to a 7D?

peregrineflier wrote in post #14289570
Like in this shot, and my skies look dirty. Or is it an exposure problem?

Tom, it is hard to say for certain because it looks like the image was compressed a bit for the web, but from some of the noise that I see, it appears that you used DPP to process the image. If so, the cause might be over-sharpening. I think it is what Canon calls mosquito noise. Anyway, I don't see that particular type of noise when using Adobe Camera Raw (not to say that over-sharpening in ACR doesn't produce noise and degrade images).

Additionally, if you underexpose and then boost exposure during post processing, noise will rear its ugly head even in low ISO images. It is worth trying to expose as far as you can to the right without blowing out details and then lowering exposure in post processing. When done successfully, I am able to get clean images at ISO 3200 and even higher when doing this. I have always preferred Camera Raw to DPP. Even so, last summer when I upgraded from CS3 to CS5, the improvement in noise handling has been amazing.

Canon's DPP has had lens aberration correction for quite some time, but I always thought that the adjustment controls it had were rather wimpy. Now that Adobe has added really effective lens corrections, it has made a huge difference and simplified correction of chromatic aberration as well as distortion.

If you use Adobe Camera Raw or Adobe Lightroom or contemplate using either of them, it would be a great benefit to get the book Real World Adobe Camera Raw (latest edition for CS5) by Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe.

For what they are worth, two suggestions would be to try not to underexpose ad not over-sharpen, especially not during the raw conversion stage. You can sharpen for effect in Photoshop using edge masks. One more thing, don't pay too much attention to high frequency noise seen while pixel peeping.

I had a 7D, which seemed better than that at ISO 100. The only shot I can find with a lot of sky is this one, taken a f16, ISO 200, 1/200 at 250mm on an EF-S 55-250 IS. Not sure how it'll look when resized for uploading, this is the whole shot resized for uploading and is a Jpeg SOOC with no PP.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/67765667@N08/7​093222973/

Tsmith wrote in post #14290507
The profiles in CS4 ACR are outdated but I suggest trying different ones to see if there is any difference. In CS5 and Lightroom 3 & 4 you have the option to use lens profiles that I've found to work great. They auto correct CA and distortion to an extent.

Not sure if lens profile would make a difference in noise handling but i'll keep that in mind and hopefully upgrade to CS5/6 soon. Thanks BlueDog.

Maybe the sky looked dirty because it really was dirty -- or the white balance was off. Adjusting the sky color to appear more "natural" can sometimes help a bit in making the sky appear less noisy. The color of ambient light can make colors appear a lot different to a camera than to our eyes. This is especially true as the sun starts to get low in the sky during the last couple hours of daylight and the amount of red increases. When this happens, I check the RGB values of what I think ought to be nice blue sky. Using ProPhotoRGB color values, a nice blue sky usually shows that the red value is about 8 - 10 less than the green and the blue can be 10 - 30 or more than the green. I haven't checked to see how this compares to sRGB or AdobeRGB color values. I sometimes tweak the sky RGB values especially if the red is very close to the green.

While sampling the sky color I tweaked the white balance values in Adobe Camera Raw. This also seems to have improved the rope color assuming that it is supposed to be white. I also cheated a bit by increasing the brightness slightly and applying a small amount of noise reduction. After importing to Photoshop the only processing was to convert the image profile to 8-bit sRGB and combine before and after images.