Iso info

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
Your basic question is unanswerable. Noise is a subjective thing. What may be an acceptable level to you may not be acceptable to someone else... There are several add-in and stand-alone programs as well as features in the 2 programs you mentioned for reducing ISO noise... There are also styles of images that lend themselves to higher ISO noise than others, all other factor being equal.

Suggest you spend some time with a test setup to test YOUR own camera and see what's acceptable to you.
 

hark

Administrator
Staff member
Super Mod
Contributor
Im finding any iso over 800 is poor quality photos, anyone else finding this,

I don't have the D500--mine include the D7200, D7100, D750, and D610--but I can't believe the D500 would be any worse than the D7100. I used that body for hundreds of drama photos that were printed. My ISO was at least 2000 and sometimes as high as 3200. It wasn't a problem.

As Fred mentioned, there are a number of plug-ins and/or alternative programs that address noise. Nik Dfine is one that works very well. I invoke it within Photoshop. After it runs through the Auto setting, I go in and lower the amount of noise reduction so things don't look so plasticy.

What are you doing during post processing? The more you crop, noise splotches become larger (not as fine-grained). The more you raise shadows, the more noise you introduce. Nailing exposure or erring on the side of slight over exposure helps since that drastically cuts down on having to raise shadows during post processing.

If you are using Camera RAW (or Lightroom), in addition to the Luminance setting under Noise Reduction, you should play around with the Color Noise slider. That directly reduces the colored splotches. Just don't overdo Noise Reduction. As I said earlier. too much noise reduction makes things look plasticy.

I routinely shoot at ISO 3200 to 5000 (and sometimes higher) during Worship. Those images get printed for a calendar that has pages slightly larger than 8.5x11. It hasn't been an issue for me.

If you shoot a lot of jpeg, then consider turning on Active-D lighting if it's an option on that body. Active-D lighting lowers contrast so more detail is visible in the shadows. That means not having to raise shadows as much during post processing. Using non-destructive editing such as adjustment layers (such as a curves adjustment layer in Photoshop vs. Lightroom or Camera RAW editing to the image) is better than applying adjustments to layers directly. When adjustments are made to the file directly, it changes the pixels. I'm wondering if what you are doing during post processing is causing more noise to be visible. If you have a NEF you can upload to Dropbox (or some other file sharing site), let some of us look at it and have a go with editing it.
 

Danno

Senior Member
Im finding any iso over 800 is poor quality photos, anyone else finding this,

I do not have a D500 either. I do have a D7200. I found in my case when I was having trouble with seemingly moderate iso and getting a lot of noise I found I was underexposing the shot and trying and trying to pull some detail out of the shadows and darks. When I started looking more at the Histogram and focused on trying to neither have blowouts on the High or Low End of the exposure I found I was adding less noise in post-processing and getting cleaner, printable, shots.
 

Woodyg3

Senior Member
Contributor
I have 16x20 prints at over 800 ISO from my D500 that look great. As has been mentioned, proper exposure and post processing will make a big difference. Shadows and large areas of one color will always show some noise, even at base ISO.

My D500 shows less noise than my D7100, for what it's worth.
 

bandit993

Senior Member
This was printed at 8.5 x 11 and looks fine. It is at 7200 ISO. Now keep in mind this was converted to Jpg.
 

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