Noise Reduction

This seemed like the best area for this discussion... one of the biggest arguements my partner and I have on photo processing is using noise reduction.

I hate taking a noisy photo, which loses sharpness anyway because of the noise, and applying noise reduction to it, cutting back even further on sharpness. To this point I'm also willing to lose detail in suits in order to keep noise down.

My partner hates seeing noise and will happily harass me until I turn the noise reduction all the way up. He also prefers to up the fill light and gain back suit detail, than apply noise reduction to the photo.

We don't print the photos ourselves very often, and the one time I presented the client the choice between the two they liked the smoother photo.

I would like to get a feel from those who print more frequently how much the noise and the subsequent reduction is noticeable when printed around an 8x10. Have clients seen both versions and which do the majority prefer.

I've printed ISO 1600 (1D2) and ISO 3200 (1D3) shots, only using a bit of color NR in LR.

No objectionably noise whatsoever.

Expose well, pixel peep less, print more

If you want to judge noise, view a display on the monitor that is close in size to the intended print. Doing some math, the 5D2 at full res is 3744x5616 pixels. If your monitor is 100 ppi (it is probably in the area of 96-100 ppi) a 100% zoom will be 37.44x56.16 inches and a 25% zoom will be 9.4x14 inches and so will be a good approximation of how an 8x10 (8x12) will look.

You can setup Photoshop with the ppi of your monitor, Edit/Preferences/Unit and Rulers/Screen Resolution. My monitor is 96. Also set Print Resolution to what you use to resize/resample for Print. I use 360 because my lab wants 360. So, after I resize/resample for print I get a very good idea of what it will look like on print, in terms of noise and sharpness (even though it is not being viewed at 100%).

Then when using the Hand Tool just click on Print Size in the main wIndow or View/Print Size.

ah....much of that seems to have gone over my head but I'll fiddle with it and I'm sure I'll get the gist once I'm mucking in the preferences.

Thanks!

tzalman wrote in post #11597549
If you want to judge noise, view a display on the monitor that is close in size to the intended print. Doing some math, the 5D2 at full res is 3744x5616 pixels. If your monitor is 100 ppi (it is probably in the area of 96-100 ppi) a 100% zoom will be 37.44x56.16 inches and a 25% zoom will be 9.4x14 inches and so will be a good approximation of how an 8x10 (8x12) will look.

Looking at the 25% view is much nice than pixel peeping. I spend so much time fixing blemishes I'm just used to zooming into 300% for everything. Thanks.

tzalman wrote in post #11597549
If you want to judge noise, view a display on the monitor that is close in size to the intended print. Doing some math, the 5D2 at full res is 3744x5616 pixels. If your monitor is 100 ppi (it is probably in the area of 96-100 ppi) a 100% zoom will be 37.44x56.16 inches and a 25% zoom will be 9.4x14 inches and so will be a good approximation of how an 8x10 (8x12) will look.

Careful! this is not right since zoom display on PS performs a nearest neighbour reescaling (for obvious speed reasons), and this kind of rescaling means preserving SNR. So you don't have to zoom 25% to estimate how noise will look like, you have to resize to 25% and display at 100% zoom. Zooming at 25% would look much noisier.

Regards

I think this is true for PSCS3 and older, but not for PSCS4 and 5?