Sirozina, I'm afraid you are wrong about the contrast levels in the "woodland shot." I had to lift the levels of the darkest shadows in post for this shot because increasing the exposure in camera would have blown the bright greens. In fact the original shot exceeds the dynamic range of the histogram display.
(I made three bracketed exposures of this scene for that reason, and would have combined them had this shot turned out to be worth it. For the record, this example is a single unsharpened RAW conversion as described in my earlier post.)
I'm very familiar with the need to increase "brightness" in shadow areas. I just printed 3 photographs from this particular shooting session, and all three contained extreme dynamic range - going from deep shadow (such as the black areas you can find in this image) to areas lit by full sun.
If you push shadows you will increase noise - that is just the way digital capture works. As I wrote once before in this long thread, there are ways to deal with this, some very old and some new to digital.
When I saw brainiac's most recent post with the really terrible chroma noise on the interior of the cup, what I saw was completely out of sync with what I'm getting from my 5DII. (And I'm a careful and knowledgeable shooter who prints.) I can only think of a few explanations:
1. There is something very different about how his camera works in comparison to mine.
2. The cup was in much deeper shadow than it appears in the final photograph, and the noise is a by-product of significant pushing of the shadows. (I might have used a tripod and exposure bracketed or thought about some artificial lighting.)
Take care,
Dan