Masamune -- 7D High ISO shots

Hello! I have had my 7D for a few months now, but I have never really needed to push the ISO beyond 3200 very often. In fact, I try to stay around 1600. Recently, my friends band played a show at a local venue, and the lighting was rough. It was essentially comprised of only red and purple lights, and there were not many of them. For the first time, I regularly shot at ISO 6400, and I am pretty happy with the results. The images cleaned up nicely, and with some light post processing, you can barely tell that some of these images were shot at ISO 6400.

1. ISO 4000

photos do look good...nice job

Nice pp...what noise plug-in did you use?

wow for 6400 and red and blue light they turned out extremley well. Better then anything I have had in those same conditions. Well done.

Pretty good iso6400 shots, atleast I know I can push it that far if I need to.

Zeineth wrote in post #10526411
wow for 6400 and red and blue light they turned out extremley well. Better then anything I have had in those same conditions. Well done.

I was really impressed with how the 7D's AF handled this lighting. It was fast, and spot on, as usual. My trusty ol' 40D would not have been able to do this. I remember with red light, it had a very hard time finding focus, and finding it accurately.

These real life shots to me just prove what I have seen done in lots of tests -- the 7D is about 1.5 stops better in (Higher) ISO's than the 40D. It also cleans up nicer.

Six and eight very interesting.

Agree on #6.
Not sure about the processing though.

6 had lots of obvious noise, so I messed around with it a bit in order to hide it. I agree, it is "interesting" but I like how it came out overall. Maybe I should have turned down the contrast a bit or tried to not blow out so many highlights.

Coppatop85 wrote in post #10516282
The images cleaned up nicely, and with some light post processing, you can barely tell that some of these images were shot at ISO 6400.

Can you define the bolded portion above? What you consider light PP others may think are excessive, and vice versa. Either way, I think these came out pretty good considering the red and blue lighting like mentioned earlier in the comments.

#6 caught my eye immediately. It was my favorite. It may make a nice poster too. Very nice save for what sounds like was a lost photo.

Yeah, the 7D at ISO 6400 is very usable. I routinely shoot at 3200 with little worry about noise or loss of detail.

#6 is great,,, If I were 16 I would want that as a poster on my wall.

Very impressive

JustinL wrote in post #10630988
Can you define the bolded portion above? What you consider light PP others may think are excessive, and vice versa. Either way, I think these came out pretty good considering the red and blue lighting like mentioned earlier in the comments.

Sure thing. First of all, I make the image slightly smaller, this has two purposes, one is to make the image small enough to be uploaded to my website (11MB is the limit) and it also "hides" the noise.

I adjust the contrast/curves/levels and find that those reduce or hide the noise as well, and also run it through Noise Ninja, a photoshop plug in. I also do some selective blurring, and that's about it.