Larry Colen wrote:
I'm still wrestling with my K20D in high ISO. I'm often severely
disappointed with the noise level. Last night, I posted these shots to
facebook:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157622030236980/
I just got a note from a friend of a friend about them:
Eric's friend Joe here. Hey, saw the pics you posted, very nice! The
lighting was really nice, was it just natural light or fill-flash? It
was very nice lighting, but I wondered if if was off-camera
flash. Maybe high ISO, but they didn't look noisy. Just wanted to say
nice pics!
So, it's interesting that a Canon user thinks that my ISO 1600-3200
shots are done with a flash because they aren't very noisy.
Then again, I'm not posting the ones that look like crap.
I think you are being overly picky, actually. The noise level in those
shots is not bad at all, and is about what I would expect to get.
The noise artifacts you are seeing in your shots could be very easily
improved by post-processing with a noise-reduction plugin. I like and
use Imagenomic Noiseware which can be plugged-in to Lightroom, Photoshop
(including Elements) and Aperture (I believe). The secret to using the
NR plugins is to use them very sparingly or they kill detail. I set
Noiseware to something like 0-10% for highlights, 20-30% for mids and
80-100% for shadows. Shadow and black areas is usually where noise is
most evident and detail is the least important.
I'd be willing to bet that you could even get pretty good results with
the built-in NR in Adobe Camera Raw, at least the implementation in CS4.
I've been using that lately, without PP with Noiseware, and I get good
results, although I'm not generally straying above ISO 1600.
I'm finding that manual focus is working a lot better for me than
autofocus in low light dance photography, but that sometimes I'll just
totally blow the focus. I think that it is because I'm using the red
focus alerts as an aid, and sometimes they get confused.
Do you have a 360FGZ or 540FGZ? Try attaching the flash and setting it
to do AF focus-assist *only* (ie no flash).
-bmw
--
PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List
PDML@pdml.net
http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow
the directions.
