I was out and about with my Z9 yesterday, on which I had previously enabled "High ISO NR" with the Type A noise reduction. I had been testing JPEG output at high ISO and had forgotten to turn it off, assuming it would only kick in past a certain ISO value.
Nope!
When I was processing the photos, I noticed plasticy, worm-like artifacts in shadows, not unlike what you'd see back in the day with Fuji RAW files in Lightroom. After comparing my Zf settings (never seen this, shoot almost exclusively JPEG on it) to the Z9, I found that High ISO NR was the culprit.
I was noticing this over-smoothing on files that were down to around ISO 200. That got me looking at Nikon's documentation, which surprisingly says this: Reduce noise in photographs taken at all ISO sensitivities. Not what you'd think given the name of the feature.
Luckily, you can always use NX Studio to disables settings like this if you shoot RAW + JPEG and then re-export the JPEG.
I've never used the camera NR function. Is there any point if using RAW and DXO?
Software seems to do better with the ugly truth for the AI NR functions.
EB-1 wrote:
I've never used the camera NR function. Is there any point if using RAW and DXO?
Software seems to do better with the ugly truth for the AI NR functions.
EBH
It depends on your use case. Sometimes you HAVE to shoot JPEG if turnaround time is a thing. Sometimes you want to use Nikon recipes. I don't know if DXO can denoise a TIFF, which is what you'd have to be able to do for the latter.
