7d high iso fun and silliness (warning: long rambling post!)

So I picked up a 7d last week. Unfortunately the weather here has been grey and rainy (Portland lol) so I haven't had the chance to go hiking around anywhere to do much with it. So I've been messing around in my apartment taking pictures of my owner *ahem* i mean my cat. The pesky nuisance that he is. But it's so dim in here---boo for old apartments with no overhead lighting.

Take a few pictures at iso 6400 and they look pretty good. Take a few at iso 12800 and they are usable at small sizes but at larger sizes they look fairly bad (granted I think you could print a passable 8x10 with them). This is at like 2am and I'm bored so I start making some neat image profiles and then going over the files looking for what is really the "problem areas". Play with the raw development settings and I get things to work better but the issue of the color "blotches" remains so I stayed up till like 7am working on ways to get rid of it and turning them into an action I could use later. My copy of the 7d doesn't seem to have any pattern noise which definately helps in being able to clean things up. Anyway, I'm sure the results probably won't impress those of you with full frame stuff but for me coming from an XSI what I was able to get from the camera is definitely enough to satisfy me!

Iso 12,800:

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Congrats on the new gear.

wow 52k looks so unpleasantly noisy @_@;
25600 still looks GREAT =)

Very impressive! I'm sure there will be a fair number of people who would appreciate some tips on how to get those kind of results (including me).

Replaces wrote in post #9058967
wow 52k looks so unpleasantly noisy @_@;
25600 still looks GREAT =)

Hehe. I don't know if I'd call 25,600 *great*...I guess for 25,600 it looks pretty good though . At 100% the image looks pretty messy but that's not really very meaningful. Important thing is it makes a fine 8x10 (you'd never know it was shot at that iso lol, i'm going to take the print to work on monday to show a few of the photo junkies we have there lol) and looks fine at normal screen viewing sizes.

It seems to me that it's not really the overall amount of noise in the image that matters but the type of noise. At 100% the images have a ton of high frequency luminance noise still in them. However this doesn't really matter in my opinion, it just adds a "grain" to the picture if you are viewing it at 67% or 100%. You can remove this noise but the detail goes right along with it and it doesn't particularly detract from the picture so it's worth keeping it and thus keeping the detail.

The chroma noise is much much more distracting in my opinion. Neat image takes care of most of that nicely. The worst part is the color blotches (on the 7d they seem to mostly be yellow-ish blotches). Those are what makes the images look horrible even at normal viewing sizes (in my opinion). Neat Image doesn't help with them at all sadly. As far as I know the 7d doesn't have pattern noise so fortunately there's no need to worry about that--just the annoying blotches.

One last post before I head out...100% crop from right eye iso 12800. The focus was on the nose so this area is a bit blurry. It seemed to show a bit more noise and it's easier to see what is noise and what isn't because areas on sharp focus seem to kind of hide some of the luminance noise. The white square is an inlay of what the unprocessed image looked like.

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Cats are great, so is the 7D.