Highest usable ISO for 7D

[Bob Serling]

What is the highest ISO I can use on my 7D without encountering significant levels of noise? I'm interested in being able to get the fastest shutter speed for freezing birds in flight.

Thanks!

Bob Serling

[John Chardine]

Hi Bob- I would recommend doing some tests on your own camera. Noise perception is a personal thing and it would be best if you were the judge. Noise is also contextual- you may not want it in a wildlife portrait but it might look great for that moody night scene. Furthermore, noise out of the camera does not mean noise in the image. There are many excellent noise reduction programs out there now and processing in Canon's Digital Photo Professional makes the noise easier to deal with.

In your tests, try exposing to the right to reduce the noise as much as possible.

A good target for noise is a blue sky. Set your camera up and run up the ISOs. Have a look. Who knows, you may be surprised by what you see!

[Bob Serling]

Thanks, John. Simple but great advice: go out and actually test it! I'm definitely going to do it.

At the same time, if anyone has much experience shooting birds in flight above 400 ISO, I'd love to hear what you think about the quality of your images at 800 and beyond.

Bob Serling

[Doug Schurman]

I believe there are several assumptions / factors the will impact how people answer this.

My feeling is if you fill the frame, expose to the right, nail the focus and have excellent post processing skills then ISO 1600 and possibly ISO 3200 can look really nice for birds in flight. I don't good samples myself and I don't consider myself a skilled post processor yet.

I think it is quite common though for people to try to really push what they captured. Let's face it a lot of people don't have a lens longer than 400mm at f5.6. They may be cropping off more than 60% of both the vertical and horizontal and then trying to make that file look great. If you are cropping that much off it is my feeling that the visible noise looking at the cropped image will be similar to bumping ISO up a stop or 2 and looking at the image full frame.

There's a guy who posts on POTN call TeamSpeed. This guy don't shoot birds really but he is very skilled at managing noise in the 7D. He has shots at ISO 12,800 that look much better than I would have expected. A link to a thread where he discusses his process is below.
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=1079217&highlight=mini-review+7d+iso

[John Guastella]

My feeling is if you fill the frame, expose to the right, nail the focus and have excellent post processing skills then ISO 1600 and possibly ISO 3200 can look really nice for birds in flight.

+1 on this advice, particularly the suggestion to "fill the frame". As long as you keep your cropping to a minimum, 7D images acquired at ISO 3200 have acceptable IQ. The BG will probably require some NR, though.

John

[Bob Serling]

Thanks Doug & John. Sounds like I have a very good chance of shooting at 800 ISO without much problem. I live in the San Diego area so getting close enough to fill the frame with shore birds, ducks and raptors is reasonably easy. It's the smaller buggers where it's always a challenge. But I'm definitely going to test out some higher ISOs today, hopefully with kingfishers in flight and squabbling with each other for food rights.

[Daniel Cadieux]

The answer will vary depending on who you ask. I'm on ISO 800 75% of the time and I love the results. Some people hate the 7D at ISO 400! Most of these people pixel-peep at 100% or more which is not "real world" situation to me. As some have mentioned already, expose to the right (or at the very least expose "properly") and avoid heavy cropping. Here's an article I wrote for Artie's blog that appeared a couple of weeks ago about the 7D:

http://www.birdsasart-blog.com/2012/09/18/how-dan-cadiuex-masters-canon-eos-7d-image-files/

[David Stephens]

I use ISO 800 as my default and move up to ISO 1600 when forced to by light and SS requirements. I process with DxO's Optics Pro 7.5 and find that I need to add some Chromanance adjustment at ISO 1600, typically.

[Dennis Zaebst]

David, what do you mean by "chrominance"? Color noise (not luminance noise) or just color balance? I just tried searching on the term and it is usually defined as the color (RGB) component of a signal. Please elaborate. Thanks!

Best regards,
Dennis

[David Stephens]

Dennis, I mean color noise, like red dots when looked at high magnification.

[Bob Serling]

Dan - What a superb article! Thank you so much for sharing your process in such detail. I learned a lot.

Bob Serling

[Jack Breakfast]

To concur with folks above: I happily use the 7D at iso800 approximately 90% of the time. I've had some success with shots up to iso1600, but only when the images consist of lighter backgrounds and not too much shadowy business. To my eye, the files at iso800 look excellent. Proper exposure is a must! But even if you do underexpose a little bit, you can still salvage the image with today's impressive noise reduction software. But yes yes yes, expose properly!

[Mat Bingham]

I agree with what has been said so far. I have had a 7D for about 18 months. I find up to ISO800 is fine with excellent results. ISO1600 needs some work.

[Corey Hayes]

I use 400 and 800 but have been unhappy with 1600, seems to loose a lot of detail. 800 is good though with a little tweaking.

[Markus Hanika]

My experience:
I also typically use up to ISO 800. Cropping is then also possible to some extent. At large crops noise can be seen at 500+ ISO already.
If one can utilize the full frame probably 1600 ISO could be okay as well.
In all case noise reduction on homogeneous BGs will increase IQ.
All in all, a general maximum noise can't be given. As stated in posts before it depends very much on the shot (object, framing, size) itself.
As far as i understand, the highlights have a little bit of extra headroom. So exposure of to the right should enable reducing a little bit of lowlight noise after adjusting levels as well. But i haven't this very in detail yet.

[Morkel Erasmus]

ISO-200. :bg3: LOL, that's if you believe some people.

When I was still shooting Canon, I used to push mine quite routinely to ISO-1250 and ISO-1600. If you know how to process the RAW files it's not a big issue.
I have printed large files at these ISO's and they look great. I will chime in with Daniel to say expose somewhat to the right!

[Ben_Sadd]

I generally agree with what has been said, with care about exposure and a little processing (nothing usually extra on the subject) iso 1600 is perfectly usable. Two recent hoatzin posts were both shot at iso 1600 on the 7D (single (http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php/103227-Hoatzin?highlight=hoatzin), group (http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php/103257-Strike-a-pose-hoatzins?highlight=hoatzin)), and I think the results are not terrible. These images have also been printed out at 18inches wide and look good.

[Corey Hayes]

I think 1600 is usable in some cases but more often then not I would never use it as you loose so much detail in your subject especially when you have to crop. Sure if I take a picture and feel the frame then I am sure 3200 iso would work but more often then not we don't have that and we have to crop, at anything above 400 you start loosing fine detail that is very hard to get back.

A Lot of images look good once you down scale for the web but full res generally looks a lot worse.

I really hope the next APC canon sensor is a lot better, I have read on a lot of canon boards that you cant improve APC sensors any more, this is simply not true just look at the Sony sensors found in Nikon or the Pentax K5 they simply blow away all canons crop body sensors including the one found in the 1dmk4 and even some of the full frames.

At the end of the day the 7D is an old camera its been on the market for 3 years and was probably in testing 2 years before that so its 4 or 5 year old tech.

[Graeme Sheppard]

One way to improve an APS-C sensor is to take a full frame sensor and cut the edges off.
Well, not literally but I can see no reason why the 1DX 18MP sensor can't simply be made into a APS-C sensor, except at only 7MP people would not be happy.

However, the D800 sensor would trim down to 14MP...

Anyway, back on track, I've got a lovely ISO 12800 photo of an owl, and I'd hate to be without it!
And no, I don't sell my photos.