Is there something wrong? Noise!

Ok, ive had my 20D for a little over a year now, and ive used it for MANY different things many different times. I recently shot the following paintball pictures, indoors, in very poor lighting, and was not allowed to use flash. With my 70-200F4L I was forced to underexpose soem of them a bit, with the 24-60 sigma i sometimes could get good exposures, but tha particular lens is terrible in low light so i didnt get the best results. all of these were at ISO 1600 and they seem REALLY noisey to me... Ive used 1600 several tmes and it seems as though the IQ has progressively gotten worse over the months......

could there be a problem???

Ex:

Under exposed pictures will have a lot more noise than properly exposed pictures (especially at high ISO's). I suspect that's maybe the culprit in this case.

Kurt

Doesn't seem like too much noise for underexposed ISO 1600.
At least nothing that cannot be fixed nicely with Noise Ninja or Noiseware..

Im using noiseninja right now to fix them, and i suppose it will take some practice to get the noise reduced without totally hacking the picture. Im going back next weekend, and im bringing a 70-200 2.8IS to see how much that helps. I wasnt aware that underexposed images will show more noise. That explains a TON!

Yea, if you underexpose a shot and try to bring detail back out in processing you will get noise, higher the ISO, more noise from shadow areas. Don't know if you shot them in RAW but that helps a bit with getting more detail back out too.

ya they were shot in raw, but theres only so much i can do with some of them, even noiseninja isnt really helping that much(making the images look too soft). maybe if any of you who are more experienced w/it, could give it a shot, id love you forever!

Thanks for the info guys, i will be taking a 2.8IS and a monopod next weekend!

I incresed satuation a little ajusted shadow highlight's a little run it through Noiseware then back into ps for a touch of USM. .
Rob.

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seems like classic underexposure and auto exposure settings fixing it in CS, and leaving noise.

gyrob wrote in post #2362482
I incresed satuation a little ajusted shadow highlight's a little run it through Noiseware then back into ps for a touch of USM. .
Rob.

Nice fix, looks much cleaner now.

The other thing to remember is that unless you intend to blow these shots up to poster sized prints, even the noisy pictures will look pretty good when jammed into a 5X7 print. It's amazing how much detail (and noisy detail) these cameras capture that gets tossed away when printing.

Don

303villain wrote in post #2357020
I wasnt aware that underexposed images will show more noise. That explains a TON!

I did a exposure comparison between the different ISO levels on my 300D, and it shows pretty well how underexposure introduces additional noise when the exposure is corrected in post processing.

Comparison
Images are organized left to right (1 stop underexposed, correctly exposed, 1 stop over exposed) and top to bottom from 100-3200 ISO. The overexposed and underexposed images had the exposure corrected in post processing, no other post processing was done to the images.

303villain wrote in post #2356979
Ok, ive had my 20D for a little over a year now, and ive used it for MANY different things many different times. I recently shot the following paintball pictures, indoors, in very poor lighting, and was not allowed to use flash. With my 70-200F4L I was forced to underexpose soem of them a bit, with the 24-60 sigma i sometimes could get good exposures, but tha particular lens is terrible in low light so i didnt get the best results. all of these were at ISO 1600 and they seem REALLY noisey to me... Ive used 1600 several tmes and it seems as though the IQ has progressively gotten worse over the months......

could there be a problem???

what the others said, under exposing at high ISO is what caused it