Ron Hew wrote:
Even ISO 400 is too much noise if you expose wrongly

Well, yes and no. By "exposing wrongly" you most likely mean "underexposing" (please correct me if I am wrong). And the picture in the OP is _on purpose_ underexposed by two stops. Intentional and unintentional underexposure are technically the same - both will be treated with the exposure slider moved right. One you do consciously, the other is an oops, but that's about it.

1DsMkIII love fest notwithstanding, someone please educate me on how you "push" a properly exposed ISO 3200 file two stops and make it 12800? Aren't you way over exposing your image?

Now I suppose if you're purposely underexposing by two stops to get a faster shutter speed so your subject isn't blurry, you don't have much of a choice. But why not just get a camera that does what you want natively?

24Peter wrote:
1DsMkIII love fest notwithstanding, someone please educate me on how you "push" a properly exposed ISO 3200 file two stops and make it 12800? Aren't you way over exposing your image?

Nobody said anything about properly exposing (not that I had noticed, anyway). The image is on purpose two stops under.

Now I suppose if you're purposely underexposing by two stops to get a faster shutter speed so your subject isn't blurry, you don't have much of a choice. But why not just get a camera that does what you want natively?

Because you may not have one, or have one on hand In the Canon lineup, you may be disappointed getting a 12800 capable camera today.

How did you process that image? Did it start life as an in-camera JPG or a RAW file? If the latter, what converter did you use, with what settings?

I ask because I can't get 12800 to look anywhere near as good as that. Sniff.

A RAW full frame pushed to ISO 12800 in Lightroom 1.4.1, accepting the defaults except for exposure and white balance. Notice the banding in the midtone area at upper left:

I agree with Glassbottle, I couldn't get much out of anything over 3200 ISO

David

Why ISO 12800 anyway? Looks like a pretty ordinary shot and decent light. So I wonder why Please don't tell me "just to prove that canon is better than nikon..."

Ron Hew wrote:
Even ISO 400 is too much noise if you expose wrongly

Ron....this was pushed two stops.............i.e. he deliberately did not expose it properly at all

Glassbottle, LR and ACR dump a significant amount of noise into an image. It is not what I would use to convert from RAW for a high ISO shot ever. Especially if Im in a recovery situation like above.

Convert in DPP with noise and sharpness OFF. WB, brighten. Finish in PS

morganb4 wrote:
Glassbottle, LR and ACR dump a significant amount of noise into an image. It is not what I would use to convert from RAW for a high ISO shot

Edited to add: My questions below are now answered in your post. Could've sworn ... never mind

... and so you would use... ? DPP ?

I have DXO Optics 5.1 as well. Might try that for laughs.

By the way, I feel Lightroom's noise performance has improved enormously in the last couple of releases. It was pretty tacky back at 1.1.

Edited by Glassbottle on Jul 04, 2008 at 12:44 PM GMT

stanj wrote:
Intentional and unintentional underexposure are technically the same - both will be treated with the exposure slider moved right. One you do consciously, the other is an oops, but that's about it.

But remember, when explaining to clients, it's always intentional, and they don't deserve talent on your scale. ;-)

Glassbottle,
Yes I would, for critical shots. Also if Im having stress WB an image then I can be pretty sure that DPP can do it.

Dont get me wrong, Im not saying that DPP is a better RAW conversion package than LR, I just think that its a better RAW converter than the ACR engine.

If you love LR so much you may want to try using DPP to convert to TIFF and do the colour and funky stuff in LR?

morganb4 wrote:

Dont get me wrong, Im not saying that DPP is a better RAW conversion package than LR, I just think that its a better RAW converter than the ACR engine.

I agree. Now that you mention it, I'm looking forward to trying it out when I get back to my desktop computer.

Still curious to hear from Brainiac what his method was.

24Peter wrote:
Now I suppose if you're purposely underexposing by two stops to get a faster shutter speed so your subject isn't blurry, you don't have much of a choice.

That's exactly it. Set iso 3200 and -2 exp comp, and you are now really shooting at 12800. Images will look very underexposed on the camera, but push two stops in your raw developer, and you have a nicely exposed shot like the one I showed above. It really is exactly the same thing as shooting at iso 12800, as your shutter speed and aperture are what they would be with that iso.

>But why not just get a camera that does what you want natively?

In my case, looking at the 5D and 1D3, and Canon's long-standing lead in sensors if not in noise-reduction, I decided that the 1Ds3 would very likely match the D3's famous high iso performance, so I went ahead and bought one instead of waiting for a D3. I figured Nikon's full-frame chip had probably caught up with the 2005 5D, and the rest is noise reduction. Luckily, it worked out for me, and I don't need to get a Nikon for high iso performance.

There is also the small matter of (full-frame 14 bit) 21 megapixel, which makes it the current king of everything image quality related, unless low iso clunky medium format appeals. It has 9 million more pixels than a D3, which, apart from anything else, makes cropping a pleasure. Although it narrowly beats the D3 at iso 12800, at iso 200 it stomps all over it.

Like Morgan said, convert in latest DPP with no NR, no sharpening. If you want to sharpen in photoshop, then convert to Lab mode, and run USM only on the L channel. 0.5 to 0.7 pixel radius, and anything up to 400% or more works for me, depending on the material.

Don, I think your LR conversion looks OK. At 12800 you will often see streaking, and I don't know the best way to minimise its impact. I have noticed it in D3 high iso files too but not as bad. What I like about the 1Ds3 effort though, is that it seems to retain a lot more pictorial information than a D3. As a vinyl fan, that suits me. In short, it seems that iso 12800 is harder work on a 1Ds3, but ultimately better.

Gary Petersen wrote:
It works nice with this full automatic default setting of Noise Ninja too.

Thanks for that Gary. It's more or less as I thought: NN may smooth a few pixels on screen in this case, but I would rather print the original.

While it's a good idea to use the least noisy camera you can afford, at these speeds I don't see removal of grain as helping printing very much. That's why I haven't bought an NR package yet.

Isnt that "coarse noise" ?

simonella_viru wrote:
what do you think is a fair comparison between a super-mega-pixel camera like the 1ds3 and a camera like the d3 that has about half of the pixels?

The best way is to uprez the D3 file to 21 megapixels, but no doubt many people won't accept that doing that gives you the closest possible approximation to comparison by huge print. Downrezzing the 1Ds3 file is unfair because you are throwing away its detail.

In the days when M8 performance was contentious in the alt forum, many people seemed to think that something was lost from an M8 file when it was uprezzed, so although I don't subscribe to that piece of mysticism, to satisfy the sharp pixel crowd, I uprezzed the M8 file to 40 megapixel using nearest neighbour interpolation, so that the file was identical to the original in every way, and uprezzed the 5D file to the same size using bicubic.

In the case of comparing D3 and 1Ds3 one would need to double the base of the D3 file using nearest neighbour, giving 48 megapixels, but a visually identical file, and then match the new baselength using bicubic in the 1Ds3 file, to also give a 48 megapixel interpolated file.

Personally I don't think the second method shows you anything that the first method doesn't.

Thanks Richard, I'm pleased to have you declare my camera normal. I was worrying a bit (especially after an earlier banding scare caused by a duff CF card).

Nice trick with the Dust&Scratches there.

Richard,

I know I've gone on about Bibble with you before, but hear me out on this one.

Sean Puckett makes a plugin for Bibble that I think you would be very interested in for the purposes of pushing. He has developed an exposure amplification algorithm that can recover detail with dramatically less noise amplification that typical tools.

The plugin is called "Shady - Exposure Recovery". Full details here http://www.nexi.com/238

I'd love to have your RAW file to play with, so I can demonstrate how effective it really is.

Glassbottle wrote:
Thanks Richard, I'm pleased to have you declare my camera normal. I was worrying a bit (especially after an earlier banding scare caused by a duff CF card).

Nice trick with the Dust&Scratches there.

I am in the same boat. Initially I was totally amazed at the posted 12800 shots, because my 1Ds3 doesn't seem to be able to get anything like that. But with explained technique I feel better now

Let me make this clear - I did not perform selective dust and scratches on the guitar player. That image is what I get straight out of DPP, and has only had a very gentle dust and scratches over the whole frame, because I'm too cheap to buy NR software. That level of d+s would be invisible in most normal print sizes, so to all intents and purposes, that's what I get straight outta DPP.

My thanks to brainiac who gave me courage to buy my 1Ds Mk III after he exposed my faulty reasoning regarding relative noise between the Mk III and 1Ds MKIII. * As for D3 verses the Mk III s. I rate the D3 as up to 1 stop more "effective" at hi ISO (D3=6400 and Mk IIIs =3200). YMMV!

* I thought the Mk III noise should be better than the 1ds MKIII but just as brainiac sez they are identical by my informal test: When both cameras capture the same image framing (with a 28mm on the Mk III and a 35mm on the 1Ds Mk III). After enlargement to 500% the noise is virtually identical.