Somebody has just emailed me a shot from a wedding I attended. It appears to be taken with a Panasonic LX3 at 400 iso. To be honest I am quite surprised by how poor it is and how noise and NR has clobbered the file so badly. It really wasn't that dark inside the church. Is this normal? http://cyberphotographer.com/lx3/tomelena.jpg
Probably poor settings such as a lower jpeg quality and so forth. The sensor is about the size of your pinkie nail. Do you know what camera settings were used?
I took this photo with my LX3, iso 400. I found using my LX3 indispensable. It performs beautifully and I carry it everywhere with me. While traveling in Japan recently, it was often inconvenient to be carrying my 5D, but this little camera went everwhere!
After getting used to such cameras as the 1D Mark III, 5D, and 5D Mark II, I take for granted the low noise levels on higher ISO settings. When I see images from my Mom's Lumix or from my fiance's G9, I realize how spoiled I have gotten.
Well, if you look around at the original size of the image linked to, you will see the same poor noise pattern but thats the price of small sensors. The original image posted by richard is worse and was likely underexposed originally which would make the noise more visible after pp. We are spoiled with our larger sensors.
Tariq Gibran wrote:
The original image posted by richard is worse and was likely underexposed originally which would make the noise more visible after pp.
I'm pretty sure there was no post-processing. Karen's picture shows that the LX3 can do much better. The original shot does not appear to be representative of all that the LX3 can do in the circumstances.
http://cyberphotographer.com/5d2/tomelenaexit.JPG Sam Bennett wrote:
For the sake of this couple, I hope you (or somebody) took some shots with a real camera, with their flash gelled down to match the ambient light.
The couple are lit from in front by daylight, not flash.
There are a couple of reasons why I don't generally gel my flashes:
- if you are switching between daylight mixing, pure tungsten ambient, and other colours of ambient then you need to keep attaching and dismounting a range of gels
- tungsten ambient provides a nice warm glow a bit like evening sunlight and usually looks more cheerful than balanced white ambient which can look a bit clinical
- light sources, including tungsten ones, vary considerably in colour temperature: a hot tungsten will produce an off-putting bluish ambience, while disco lights and uplights will provide other variations
But it's a good trick if you need to balance the flash with tungsten.
LX3 sucks pretty bad at ISO 400 if you peep at 100%. But the above example is probably lifted in PP, and perhaps with ACR or something similar that can't do any usable NR.
This is a JPG straight out of the camera at ISO 400, f/2 and 1/25":
It does suck by comparison but not so bad, I agree with Makten that they must have cropped, or sharpened or pushed exposure in pp. Its a capable camera but it requires very careful editing even at low ISO. Cant go pushing exposure or dodging like you'd do with a file from an APS-C and above sensor.
and it's like $2 a roll here in AUS.