Home · Register · Join Upload & Sell

Moderated by: Fred Miranda
Username  

  New fredmiranda.com Mobile Site
  New Feature: SMS Notification alert
  New Feature: Buy & Sell Watchlist
  

FM Forums | Nikon Forum | Join Upload & Sell

1      
2
       end
  

Archive 2013 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range

  
 
Joseph.
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #1 · p.2 #1 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


My 'personal' upper limit on the D800 is ISO 6400. Even on very dim light, I am very happy with the 6400 images. DR is affected, but you can PP it to bring back some details.

btw, on the D4, my upper limit is 51,000 Anything higher than that and the image starts to fall apart. Usable, but ugly.



Oct 21, 2013 at 03:18 PM
Frode
Offline
• •
[X]
p.2 #2 · p.2 #2 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


DontShoot wrote:
My 'personal' upper limit on the D800 is ISO 6400. Even on very dim light, I am very happy with the 6400 images. DR is affected, but you can PP it to bring back some details.

btw, on the D4, my upper limit is 51,000 Anything higher than that and the image starts to fall apart. Usable, but ugly.


Noise level at iso 6400 is really good in my opinion (compared to D3/s when downsampled). BUT: far to often purple noise (amp. noise?) were detected in my pictures, which made many files useless. Therefore I never went higher than iso 3200.

Two things that made me get rid of my D800: purple noise that makes iso 6400 (often, not always - but still: bingo) useless, and the really bad liveview (useless for manual focusing).



Oct 21, 2013 at 03:53 PM
snapsy
Offline
• • • • • •
Upload & Sell: On
p.2 #3 · p.2 #3 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


Frode wrote:
Noise level at iso 6400 is really good in my opinion (compared to D3/s when downsampled). BUT: far to often purple noise (amp. noise?) were detected in my pictures, which made many files useless. Therefore I never went higher than iso 3200.

Two things that made me get rid of my D800: purple noise that makes iso 6400 (often, not always - but still: bingo) useless, and the really bad liveview (useless for manual focusing).


I agree. Have you ever tried using ACR/LR's shadow tint adjustment to offset the amp noise, since the noise predominates in the shadows. I do that often with acceptable (but not necessarily great) results.



Oct 21, 2013 at 04:10 PM
JimFox
Offline
• • • • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #4 · p.2 #4 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


Steve Perry wrote:
Keep in mind that even with decreased DR, the D800 still probably has more at 1600 and 3200 than most cameras of just a few years ago. I'd rather deal with decreased DR and just watch my histogram then to have blurry photos due to slow shutter speed.


+1



Oct 22, 2013 at 12:21 AM
JimFox
Offline
• • • • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #5 · p.2 #5 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


This is a good reason to not use Auto-ISO and just adjust your camera exposure as needed by yourself.

I personally don't use Auto-Iso, and though I have shot the D800 at up to 12,800 with great results, I want to be in control of when I chance the ISO, not letting the camera decide it for me.

Jim



Oct 22, 2013 at 12:24 AM
williamkazak
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #6 · p.2 #6 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


Interesting discussion even though I don't own a D800 body. However, I never embraced auto ISO. I don't want the shutter speed nor aperture moving around on me unless I set it and I also want consistent looking pictures to work in post. I suppose if things are really moving fast and you have to keep pointing your camera in different directions outdoors, than auto ISO might help you. Just imagine how far photography has come to want all of this automation in the cameras. If I am forced to retain F4 at 1/125 to shoot musicians in a club, which I do, I come in with the idea that I am going to be at ISO 3200, or ISO 1600 if the conditions warrant it. I just have to live with the digital noise, rather than a blur or zero depth of focus.


Oct 22, 2013 at 10:36 PM
Frogfish
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #7 · p.2 #7 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


It really depends what you are shooting, I may change to full manual when shooting landscapes and the like, however for birding Auto ISO is a Godsend. I know the aperture I want, I know the shutter speed range I want and Auto ISO will do the rest no matter when the bird hops into shadow, out again into bright sunlight or takes flight and I'm shooting against the sky. You can also follow the ISO in the VF and make any changes deemed necessary with the flick of a thumb/finger.


Oct 22, 2013 at 11:10 PM
krickett
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #8 · p.2 #8 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


Somebody said it earlier, a blurry shot is worth nothing. A noisy shot, or a shot with low dynamic range is worth something. In order of importance, generally speaking: sharpness (focus accuracy, lack of unintentional blur) > noise > dynamic range. Dynamic range is over-rated and misunderstood.

I would say dynamic range only matters for a limited portion of shots, depending on what you are shooting. You can have an incredibly awesome image with very few stops of dynamic range. You really have to understand when and where you're in a situation where DR matters. Wide DR simply means: can you see/recover details in highlights and shadows, and how much noise is in shadows? Under what circumstances would you even need those details? They could potentially even be a distraction!

You actually start losing DR from ISO200 onwards if I remember correctly.

Noise matters a lot... much more so than DR imo, but above all is focus. If you can't focus the way you want, your shot is destroyed. Noise is salvagable, and DR might not even matter.



Oct 23, 2013 at 01:03 AM
pr4photos
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #9 · p.2 #9 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


I'm sorry but DR is very important. There is one location where I do a lot of photography and the contrast range is very high between the shadows and the highlights. My D700 couldn't cope but the D800 retains detail in both easily


Oct 23, 2013 at 02:53 AM
Frogfish
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #10 · p.2 #10 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


Pr4 : you are talking about a specific circumstance, the D700 is a superb camera and no-one complained about it's DR when it first came out. I wonder what photographers such as Bresson would have thought of this DR dialogue.

In general I agree with krickett's comments.



Oct 23, 2013 at 05:46 AM
Mark_L
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #11 · p.2 #11 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


Frogfish wrote:
Pr4 : you are talking about a specific circumstance, the D700 is a superb camera and no-one complained about it's DR when it first came out.


No one complained because it was 6 or so years ago now. The extra DR with the D800 has been one of the best things about upgrading, it deals with lighting situations the D700 can't.



Oct 23, 2013 at 06:57 AM
pr4photos
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #12 · p.2 #12 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


When Bresson was shooting he was photographing with film. Film has a totally different characteristic to a digital RAW file. When a film image blew out the highlights it was in a much more acceptable (and pleasing) way. Digital blow out isn't nice and I welcome the extra DR


Oct 23, 2013 at 08:49 AM
Frogfish
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #13 · p.2 #13 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


Mark_L wrote:
No one complained because it was 6 or so years ago now. The extra DR with the D800 has been one of the best things about upgrading, it deals with lighting situations the D700 can't.


Well I don't think anyone would argue otherwise. However that doesn't address the question / debate. Composition, subject matter, focus and sharpness are all well ahead of DR in terms of importance to any given shot. Trying to elevate DR's importance or priority in regard to the final output would be putting the cart before the horse. Extended DR improves the output but isn't a pre-requisite to a great photo.


Edited on Oct 24, 2013 at 06:40 AM · View previous versions



Oct 24, 2013 at 06:36 AM
Frogfish
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #14 · p.2 #14 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


pr4photos wrote:
When Bresson was shooting he was photographing with film. Film has a totally different characteristic to a digital RAW file. When a film image blew out the highlights it was in a much more acceptable (and pleasing) way. Digital blow out isn't nice and I welcome the extra DR


As we all do. However please refer to the response I just gave to Mark.



Oct 24, 2013 at 06:37 AM
binary visions
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #15 · p.2 #15 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


Auto ISO has a great place in wildlife photography, any many other types of photography as well - it's wonderful when you can lock in a bunch of settings and shoot, but it's not always so easy when you're dealing with wild animals and dynamic lighting. As much as I'd love to tell the subjects where to stand, locking in a shutter speed and aperture is more important to the creative process than locking in an ISO value.

Obviously, where possible, you want to keep the ISO low, but most images become flat-out useless once they've got any motion blur in them so I don't really see any gain in substantially limiting what ISO you're willing to use. A sharp shot at ISO 12,800 is still better than a blurry shot at ISO 1600. There are a lot of fuzzy areas, of course - at a certain point, it may be worth just noting that your shutter speed is going to drop a little and trying to compensate through timing or careful technique. If you're getting blurry pictures, though, there's not much value in that increased DR.



Oct 24, 2013 at 07:45 AM
matthewo
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #16 · p.2 #16 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


I agree i use auto iso a lot in manual mode to control exposure for wildlife photography. Usually my max is set at 4000iso. I will remove auto iso on overly bright days or areas that are always in the sun. Also for manual flash of coarse and situations where im staying in one spot shooting similar lighting and subject mater.

High iso on the d800 is still very detailed and great if you can fill the frame. I have photos im still very happy with printing decent sized at 3200-5000 iso as long as its full frame. With wildlife i usually have to crop shooting smaller birds and this sometimes is where i see the most problem where i still want max detail in a small subject



Oct 24, 2013 at 11:04 AM
m.sommers00
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #17 · p.2 #17 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


binary visions wrote:
Auto ISO has a great place in wildlife photography, any many other types of photography as well - it's wonderful when you can lock in a bunch of settings and shoot, but it's not always so easy when you're dealing with wild animals and dynamic lighting. As much as I'd love to tell the subjects where to stand, locking in a shutter speed and aperture is more important to the creative process than locking in an ISO value.

Obviously, where possible, you want to keep the ISO low, but most images become flat-out useless once they've got any motion blur
...Show more

Agreed 100%. Landscape you have all the time in the world. Same with a lot of studio work. But as soon as you get wild animals and even kids & pets in the mix, it's a muchly appreciated feature. When I had my D300, I'd never consider using it because the shots above 800 were really starting to get grainy. At 6400 it's not even a huge deal unless I'm cropping a lot. I will admit there are purple fringes in the shadows at 6400 but you can just desaturate depending on what else is purple in the image, or change the tint slightly.

If you find you shoot high ISO often, getting a D800 over a D4 or D3S was not a good decision IMO.

When I'm doing B&W conversions, I notice the tones are a lot smoother at 100 than any other time. I'm not sure if it's what the software does or what but there is an appreciable difference above 400.



Oct 24, 2013 at 11:20 AM
Mark_L
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #18 · p.2 #18 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


matthewo wrote:
High iso on the d800 is still very detailed and great if you can fill the frame. I have photos im still very happy with printing decent sized at 3200-5000 iso as long as its full frame. With wildlife i usually have to crop shooting smaller birds and this sometimes is where i see the most problem where i still want max detail in a small subject


This is a big plus for the D800. On the D700 (and 5DmkIII) you visibly lose detail at high iso, the D800 sensor seems to do a good job at retaining it. The noise character is also more like grain and less 'chunky'.



Oct 24, 2013 at 12:18 PM
Alan321
Offline
• • • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #19 · p.2 #19 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


One thing about the extended DR of the D800 and other such cameras is that pretty much all of the extra is at the dark side of middle tone. There is still less than four stops DR between middle tone and being burnt out on one or more colour channels. So, you still have to guard your highlights and you still have to pay attention when the lighting changes in case you lose the highlights without realising it.

I'm a big fan of auto ISO in Manual mode, but only in Manual mode. It should in fact be enhanced a bit and I mode to go with P, A and S. And then M could go back to being just fully manual.

There are risks associated with using Auto ISO in M mode, such as...

1. It isn't always obvious that the ISO has bottomed out and wants to be smaller. i.e. the image is being overexposed. It might be obvious after reviewing the shot but by then it could be too late to get it right.

2. At low ISO you can easily recover 5 stops from the darkness but more than that will incur noise. So I can take a shot that is 5 stops underexposed if I fix the ISO at 100 but the trouble is I can't readily tell that it will be 5 stops or 6 or 4. The histogram is useless too. I'd rather let the ISO go up a bit in Auto ISO and get a "correct" exposure or at least one that see on the rear screen and the histogram. The idea of maximising the auto ISO at 800 is a good one if the image still produces some bright areas, but is wasted if everything is dark.

3. It seems that the purple noise problem can occur at any ISO but it only happens when trying to retrieve details that are lost in darkness. At ISO 100 that might mean 8 stops or so below middle tone (or 5 stops below what you can see on the LCD), but at higher ISO the noise floor is rising and there is less latitude to recover detail in the darkest areas. It's not a random thing but it can be surprising when you aren't familiar with it.

4. Although Auto ISO works properly with metering exposure adjustments in Manual mode it does not work properly with bracketing. For that the aperture or shutter speed is affected instead of the ISO. This is the shoddy aspect of the auto ISO implementation.

5. The camera ISO is shown as being about a third to a half of a stop higher higher than it really is. That can be fixed with one of the custom settings but if you do so it will not show up in the exif data as being any different and you may wonder why the same scene shot on another occasion had a different shutter speed or aperture. However, this tweak it makes it easier to match an external meter reading or the sunny f/16 rule. Most of the older cameras also had an optimistic ISO but not as much as the D800. You can see it when comparing camera sensors at DxOmark.com


At high ISO the D800 loses DR even more than the D3s does (and that means at ISO 800 and higher). Much of the extra detail in the darker areas is then being lost to noise but the bright areas still show lots of detail. You can get most of the difference in DR back by downsampling the D800 image to 12Mpx but that definitely loses data and it really messes up the non-destructive-editing workflow in Lightroom because the downsampled image is a whole new file. I'd rather get it right by using my D3s or, if it is appropriate, by using a tripod to allow a slower shutter speed and a lower ISO so that I get more DR and more details. For what I shoot, using a larger aperture with smaller DOF is usually an unacceptable alternative.

- Alan



Oct 24, 2013 at 12:25 PM
Alan321
Offline
• • • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.2 #20 · p.2 #20 · D800 ISO and Dynamic Range


m.sommers00 wrote:
When I'm doing B&W conversions, I notice the tones are a lot smoother at 100 than any other time. I'm not sure if it's what the software does or what but there is an appreciable difference above 400.


That's because there are far fewer grey tones than colour tones in an image with any RGB sensor. To be a grey tone requires R=G=B. If you have 8 stops of DR then you have 2^8 or 256 grey tones, whereas there would be 256x256x256 = 16.8million RGB combinations. At higher ISO where you get only 6 stops (for example) you get only 64 tones. At lower ISO you might get 10 stops with 1028 grey tones. How you squeeze them onto a print is another matter but you definitely lose tonal levels in the image file as the ISO gets higher.

- Alan



Oct 24, 2013 at 12:34 PM
1      
2
       end




FM Forums | Nikon Forum | Join Upload & Sell

1      
2
       end
    
 

You are not logged in. Login or Register

Username       Or Reset password



This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.