Here are some taken at ISO 200-
Here is a full size example and a 100% crop of the sky, do you see the funny speckles?
I would expect that at ISO 1600, but 200
Matt, I think this has more to do with a long exposure than with a correct exposure. With long exposures, you quickly get some hot pixels with the 1D. However, if you turn in-camera noise reduction on, most of these will dissapear (use setting on1).
Note: the in-camera noise reduction hasn't to do with noise (like Neat Image), but with hot pixels. So you can use it without your image degrading. And it works only with shutterspeeds longer than 1/15 sec.
Matt, you cannot always expose 'to the right' as, like in this shot, it would turn a dark scene lighter and ruin the shot. Just get a program like noise ninja or neat image, and just experiment and see which shots will be acceptible and which you can fix. It is not really different than using a 20D in which it reduces the noise 'in the camera'.
If you want to get fancy and just reduce the noise on parts of the picture, and leave the rest alone so you have the fine detail, you can do that in Photoshop - it just depends on how much time you want to spend on a pix.
Plus remember that if you are just showing your stuff to friends and relatives, they will not be nearly as critical as you are, so don't knock yourself out fixing everything.
1D needs good light to come to life
It's not very efficient with darkness like 20D and other 1D's series.
Try to push exposure up to 1/3.
Anyway you've got good answers so far from the experts.
azpatrick2000 wrote:
Matt, you cannot always expose 'to the right' as, like in this shot, it would turn a dark scene lighter and ruin the shot.
The approach is to expose to the right and apply -ev in post to adjust. This will control noise in many cases. Underexposing and then applying +ev will accentuate noise.
I just looked at the waves pic...
that's pretty bad, I would expect a lot better from the 1 series...
but at least it's the good kind of noise. my 300D has big blotchy noise, not fine speckles
azpatrick2000: you cannot always expose 'to the right' as, like in this shot, it would turn a dark scene lighter and ruin the shot
You can always shift the exposure to the left in post-processing. You'd end up with the same photo, but less noise.
A quick look in photoshop shows that this picture has 2/3 of a stop of dynamic range going essentially unused (less than 50 pixels). Try this for yourself: Load it into PS. Using the Levels tool, shift the whole picture to the right by 2/3 of a stop (move the middle slider to 1.59). Then move it back to the left by 2/3 of a stop (move the middle slider to 0.63). The resulting picture looks exactly the same. That's because the pixel values from 160 to 255 aren't used.
What you want to do is shoot the picture 2/3 of a stop brighter than what you have here. Then, in postprocessing, remove the extra 2/3 of a stop. By doing that, you essentially shift the noise down by 2/3 EV without changing the brightness of the picture. Noise Ninja and such are great, but it's always better to minimize noise in the first place.
Even ignoring noise, it's always a good idea to expose as far to the right as possible without blowing your highlights. You'll minimize posterization (banding) by keeping your histogram to the right.
Half your dynamic range is used to capture the brightest EV of any picture. This is due to the linear system which digital cameras use to count photons. In a 12-bit RAW pixel you have 4,096 possible values. 2,048 are used for the brightest exposure stop; 1,024 for the next darkest; 512 for the next darkest; and so forth. If your histogram is crammed up against the left, you'll only be using a couple hundred color values instead of many thousands.
