noise vs sharpness

birderman wrote in post #16565185
would it be wise then when shooting at higher Iso or in low light to add +1/3 Stop EC to ensure all pictures are slightly over exposed ?

Google "shooting to the right." There are tons of articles on this and it works extremely well in controlling noise.

Here are the raw histograms for the same images (in order). Note that the Y axis (number of pixels) is in LOG format (each equal division is 10x the previous). You can use this histogram to figure out how far "to the right" you can overexpose and push the exposure into the raw headroom of the sensor.

Night football scene. High contrast, with bright highlights and deep shadow detail, underexposed by about 2 stops.

PhotoGeek wrote in post #16567521
First part is true. The bold part is not.

Look on the sidelines at the experienced shooters and you will find IS turned off on virtually everyone of their lenses. If you can stop the action with your shutter speed, you don't need IS to stop your action.

IS does nothing to "stop" your subject. IS will help with camera shake on long lenses if you do not use a monopod or some other stabilizer. As you zoom, small amounts of camera movement translate into progressively larger amounts of pixel blur. I do not know what most sideline shooters use, and I do not shoot sports like this - but, if I were shooting long focal lengths, I would use any help I could get to stabilize the shot. Many IS lenses can sense the use of a support (like a tripod or monopod) and deactivate themselves when they sense this condition. I do not know if the OPs lens has IS, but any lens can be used with a monopod, as long as the shooting conditions and the rules of the venue permit it.

As we all know, we can control three basic aspects of the exposure: shutter speed, ISO and aperture. You need to make a trade-off to get the shot you want. If you desire to "stop" the action you need a short shutter speed. This increases the demands for getting light to the sensor on the other two parameters. If you cannot nail focus, you need to stop down the aperture to get a larger zone of acceptable focus, further cutting the light to your sensor. This places the remaining burden solely on ISO. Therefore, it is important to understand how far you can push the image in post to make the determination about how high you can go with your ISO setting before your images cannot be considered useable.

The football shots above were taken wide open f/2.8, so you can't open the aperture any further. The shutter speed can be manipulated, but maybe lowering the speed much further will introduce unwanted motion blur. So, all that is left is ISO. If ISO 3200 is producing unacceptable results, the only other way to "overexpose" is with shutter speed.

The 800 pound gorilla in the room is the lack of light available in the venues show above (with the exception of the overcast daytime outdoor scene). If these venues do not illuminate the subject sufficiently, you are going to have to live with the high ISO workflow and try to figure out how to work around it, or supply your own light. If it is allowed, there are DIY set-ups on the internet that use a monopod rig with flash shooting up from about 2 feet off of the ground - mostly for football to illuminate the players' faces inside the helmet. If you have a sufficiently high GN on your flash, you may be able to use this approach, if you shoot from a location that will permit you to get the shot (sidelines). Many gym shooters set up flash systems in the rafters or up high and remotely fire the system while they shoot. I would imagine that you have to gel those strobes to match the insipid light color from the sodium or fluorescent lamps that typically are used in a gymnasium, otherwise you have mixed white balance and color processing nightmares.

kirk

One last note for the OP - if you find that you cannot add your own light to the scene, try the Magic Lantern Dual ISO feature - i think this might be your ace in the hole.

http://www.magiclanter​n.fm/forum/index.php?t​opic=7139.0

So, we really have FOUR ways to control exposure, because we can shoot TWO ISOs simultaneously, thanks to the quirky design of the Canon sensor! However, you may have to live with lower shutter speeds and some motion blur in your images - not always a bad thing - unless you shoot in brighter locations.

kirk

Wow, lots of good stuff here! Thanks!

I'm not used to having more than ISO 1600, and was concerned about going to 3200 or 6400 for fear of more noise. But I'll give it a try this week so I can "expose to the right." I've never had much luck with a monopod, the next time I'm feeling adventurous, I'll bring it along. I'm anxious to look into the other things mentioned here (rawdigger, magiclatern).

kirkt wrote in post #16567605
One last note for the OP - if you find that you cannot add your own light to the scene, try the Magic Lantern Dual ISO feature - i think this might be your ace in the hole.

http://www.magiclanter​n.fm/forum/index.php?t​opic=7139.0
...

Just want to mention if you're going to go to the risk/trouble of using a development build of ML to use dual ISO mode, you'll probably also want to use it in combination with the Auto ETTR function (yay RAW histograms!), so you won't have to guess how far to the right to go.

Thanks Kirk, I guess these images aren't salvageable I thought maybe I was missing something in my post processing.

kirkt wrote in post #16567492
Some processing examples from ACR/PS. I left most of the luma noise so you could see what a 1024 px rendering with no luma NR looks like. I usually do not use ACR/LR, so forgive my lousy conversions.

You should experiment with your camera and find out just how much raw headroom you have to overexpose and pull back in post. If you are not the type to simply take a sample of exposures and see what "looks right", Raw Digger is a valuable tool for exploration of this kind of subject:

http://www.rawdigger.c​om

kirk