ISO is totally FAKE

Woodyg3

Senior Member
Contributor
I saw this video earlier today, and while I agree with some of what he says, he is off base in some ways. For instance, I always get more noise if I have to increase "exposure" in Lightroom than if I correctly expose in camera. So, I have yet to see a camera that is really "ISOless." Similarly, you can blow out whites in camera and never be able to get detail back.

I do think that camera manufacturers fudge their ISO numbers, and I can tell you that my D500 exposes darker at the same settings with the same lens compared to my D7200.
 

Horoscope Fish

Senior Member
While I don't know if manufacturers fudge the numbers or not, I long ago came to the understanding that ISO is not part of exposure (only aperture and shutter speed do that), that digital noise is not the same thing as (film) grain but rather a side effect of the SNR and so forth. This of course upends the whole "Exposure Triangle" paradigm/apple cart, however, which in turn tends to upset many people in photography circles (based on my experience, anyway) in general so I've quit talking about it.

I agree wholeheartedly what is now being called ISO should be rebranded as "Gain" because 1) it's the far more accurate term and, 2) gain can be measured objectively and thusly could be standardized absolutely.
 

mikew_RIP

Senior Member
I understood totally the ISO invariance thing but chose to ignore it as i like to chimp my images, what surprised me was the inconsistency of the ISO values between different manufacturers, we know now why one ISO 100 is better than another.
 

Andy W

Senior Member
Good advice at 8:57 in the video; just shoot the images correctly like you always have, stop pixel peeping, none of this really matters.
 

Andy W

Senior Member
It seems Tony has caused quite a stir with that video. I don't think that Fstoppers agreed with everything Tony said. I believe the Fstopper guy said that boosting it in post was close, but not quite as good.

Edit to add - I just saw this in the comments below the linked video:

I would like to apologise to Shaun @ F-stoppers - I said in this video that they agreed with Tony's findings, however I now realise that isn't the case. I misunderstood their interpretation of what Tony was suggesting and believed they were fully agreeing with him, having watched the video again since I realise they are actually more in line with what I am suggesting here.Sorry F-stoppers
 
Last edited:

Woodyg3

Senior Member
Contributor
Tony thrives on making these kinds of videos. His vids on not needing polarizing or neutral density filters, and on "equivalent" apertures for crop sensor cameras both really caused a lot of reaction.
 

480sparky

Senior Member
I gave up at 0:40 when he claimed it was 'a major challenge' to figure out exposure back if the film days.

He11, I was doing it at 8 years old, so it couldn't have been THAT hard. Not like rocket surgery or brain science.
 

rtchapman

New member
The difference might be that when you increase ISO in camera, the camera hardware is performing an analog amplification of analog data - pre digital conversion. When you increase exposure in Lightroom you are essentially performing multiplication on quantized numeric data. I would expect that the analog operation is bound to be smoother. I suspect that Northrop is assuming that the same operation occurs in camera or in software.
 

Dawg Pics

Senior Member
The difference might be that when you increase ISO in camera, the camera hardware is performing an analog amplification of analog data - pre digital conversion. When you increase exposure in Lightroom you are essentially performing multiplication on quantized numeric data. I would expect that the analog operation is bound to be smoother. I suspect that Northrop is assuming that the same operation occurs in camera or in software.

Welcome to the forum.
That is kind of what I was thinking. It isn't the same process in camera vs software. Anyway, he got his clickbait with the all caps "FAKE."
I would think that even if there was one agreed upon ISO instruction (sorry, not an engineer) in camera used uniformly by everybody, the individual manufacturers still have their proprietary process for digitizing the images, so the outcome for each camera would be different anyway. No? I didn't understand the point of comparing ISO for different cameras because of this.

People shoot and decide what works for them anyway, so does it really matter as long as photographers understand what the ISO settings accomplish?
 
Top