Canon S3 Sports Setting.

***Novice***I took some great little league football action shots with my Canon S3 this weekend, using the sports setting. I was zoomed in to the max. THe photos captured the action wonderfully but all the photos are grainy. Does anyone have any suggestions for fixing this? Could I have changed the ISO or something else to correct this? Thanks in advance.

Heidi

What was your ISO?
That would be my first response anyway, if the ISO was high, to drop it...I haven't used the modes on the camera (I shoot in AV when I use it) but I think you can change the ISO in the modes...or check the exposure...if it was underexposed it might be grainy.

did u have digital zoom enabled as well?

No digital zoom. I have it turned off. I have learned that photo quality really deteriorates when I use it.

yes, it does. what ISO were u set at?

try and stay away from those pre-set modes. u will have better luck with using Av Tv or Manual.

I was set at what ever ISO it defaults to in the Sports mode (don't have the pix with me to check). It was an overcast day and I was shooting from covered bleachers. I am SO NEW to this and the AV, TV and Manual mode really intimidate me. I need to get out of my box and play more with these modes. I did have some success taking portaits with the Manual mode, but haven't tried it with action shots. Suggestions would be welcomed.

The problem with sports mode is that it's a pre-set mode which means the camera does whatever it has to in order to get the shots and that means it'll kick it up to 800 ISO if need be. Which in this case, i'm betting it did. To remove the noise (the grainyness), you'll have to take it into photoshop and remove the noise that way. I hear people are also very satisfied with a program called "noise ninja". I have yet to check it out myself.

Next time, try shooting in Tv mode. select the shutter speed you want and ISO, and the camera will choose the right aperature.

I'm a fairly new S3 owner, and have had similar experience with Sports mode when taking pics of my son's soccer games. In his first game, which started at 5:00 pm so there was good light, I used Tv mode with a 1/200 or faster shutter speed and got some great action shots. I tried sports mode for the next game, which was a later start so lighting was not as good. All of the shots turned out with a good bit of noise.

As a previous poster said, in sports mode a high ISO is used to allow fast shutter speed and the S3 (like all digital cameras) has significant noise issues at ISO 400 and higher. I've been reading about noise reduction software and plan to give neat image (www.neatimage.com) a try.

Heidi, if your photos are good except the grain you can use one of the noiseware programs to remove the grain. They are not magic but they do an amazing job of cleaning up a photo. A free one you can download and use is Noiseware Community Edition. You can find it at http://www.imagenomic.​com/download.asp. Scroll to the bottom of the page and download the Community Edition 2.5 for your version of Windows. The progam is simple to use and does a great job.

In Sports Mode you can't change the ISO. If you use Av, Tv, M or P you can change your ISO but when you do you will also have to lower your shutter speed which will introduce motion blur if your taking action shots (why else would you be in Sports Mode). Then you need to decide if you want grain which you can do something about or motion blur which you can't do anything with except to call it an artisic interpretation.

Thank you all so much. This is the information I was looking for. I am going to try the TV mode tonight at my son's practice and see if I can get some better shots! I will definately check out the software options for noise reduction. Thanks for that tip! You guys rock!

Have a great day.