Curing my noise problem...

After getting home from shooting today I noticed a bunch of my pictures from my Sigma 17-70mm were quite noisy. The pictures from my lensbaby v1 weren't. I did have a polarizing filter on, a cheap hoya CP from ebay. EXIF is embedded. Any ideas what's going on? Should I be over exposing it a little bit? I'm not exactly clear on where in the range canon's get the least noise. I'm just worried about blowing out highlights if I over expose.

100% crop:

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exposure compensation -0.3step maybe?

Is this the original shot, out of camera, apart from crop? If not, can you please post the unprocessed version?

tiziano wrote in post #2394225
Is this the original shot, out of camera, apart from crop? If not, can you please post the unprocessed version?

Don't bother. It's underexposed. Read the link in my sig.

couldn't/wouldn't you just use a noise reduction software on your pics? That's probably incorrect uh? The best thing probably is to "get the picture correctly the first time".

cosworth wrote in post #2394253
Don't bother. It's underexposed. Read the link in my sig.

That's what I thought, and I wanted to see the original shot to get a confirmation.
But, after having tried to read the thread you pointed in your sig, I have a huge headache and I have lost all my certainties!

Ok, thanks for letting me know. I thoght that I was probably underexposing too much. The screen on my 350D is misleading, I always think pictures are brighter than they are and I get scared of blowing out the highlights. Yes, I do use Noise Ninja on my pictures when I process them, but the amount of noise in the image I posted can't be cured by software. The shot was only at ISO200, no reason it should be as bad as it is (with the obvious exception that I messed up the exposure).

remember this, 1/2 of the information captured by the camera is in the highlights, so unless you are overexposing by 2 stops, you should be fine for most things

Cool, good to know, thanks for helping guys.