Hi All,
I have always struggled a bit with noise reduction - It seems like guess work to me!
Last night I was shooting a school nativity, and while I arranged with the school for the main shoot to be at the dressed rehearsal where I could move around freely, I still took some shots "On the night" to make sure everything was covered, including the proud parents etc.
Now just to set the scene a little, the play was in York Minster, a huge cathedral (Which are never brightly lit) and it was also at night. This left me with some shots being taken with ISO up as high as 6400 - Those with D4's etc will see no problem with this, but I have a D7100 and I treat ISO3000 as my limit as I find noise reduction pretty baffling. The rehearsal was still in the Minster, but during the day & with the lights a little higher.
Obviously I can't post shots of the school play, but here is a shot I took when I arrived to see how the light was....
This shot has no sharpening or noise reduction (In camera NR was set to "High")
My question is how do you go about sharpening and reducing noise while maintaining a reasonable level of detail? The shots I have of some of the audience are a problem, as they were in very bad light, and when I do noise reduction on them, they end up looking like they are wax works! I use either LR or Nik Tools' DFine to do the reduction, and get very mixed results.
Here's a link to the RAW file for the shot above, if anyone wants to play - https://www.dropbox.com/s/v8e1uycne7gml2z/DSC_7079.NEF?dl=0
I have always struggled a bit with noise reduction - It seems like guess work to me!
Last night I was shooting a school nativity, and while I arranged with the school for the main shoot to be at the dressed rehearsal where I could move around freely, I still took some shots "On the night" to make sure everything was covered, including the proud parents etc.
Now just to set the scene a little, the play was in York Minster, a huge cathedral (Which are never brightly lit) and it was also at night. This left me with some shots being taken with ISO up as high as 6400 - Those with D4's etc will see no problem with this, but I have a D7100 and I treat ISO3000 as my limit as I find noise reduction pretty baffling. The rehearsal was still in the Minster, but during the day & with the lights a little higher.
Obviously I can't post shots of the school play, but here is a shot I took when I arrived to see how the light was....
This shot has no sharpening or noise reduction (In camera NR was set to "High")
My question is how do you go about sharpening and reducing noise while maintaining a reasonable level of detail? The shots I have of some of the audience are a problem, as they were in very bad light, and when I do noise reduction on them, they end up looking like they are wax works! I use either LR or Nik Tools' DFine to do the reduction, and get very mixed results.
Here's a link to the RAW file for the shot above, if anyone wants to play - https://www.dropbox.com/s/v8e1uycne7gml2z/DSC_7079.NEF?dl=0