Originally Posted by
David Levinson
Most of us display our photos on the web these days. Depending upon where I'm posting a photo I'll downsize it to 1200px on the long side and to 72 dpi and often down to 80% quality. Those constraints create a reasonably sized file of good viewing quality. Now I'm reading that 1920 px and 96 dpi may be a better for viewing on newer monitors but oh well I might as well post full resolution if I'm going to worry out into the future. This information is a primer to my main question.
What do you (this is subjective) think is an acceptable level of noise on a photo at the web resolutions described above and then what do you think is an acceptable level of noise on a photo that is to be printed at about the 11x14 size (depending upon the crop ratio used)?
I ask because some years ago I was doing a bunch of stock photography where the goal was absolutely zero noise requiring at that time 100 ISO and perfect lighting and then some good noise software and/or using tricks in photoshop to get past the review process.
Now, when photographing birds with a 1DX and a 500mm lens + a 1.4xTC I'm usually at 800 ISO minimum which in perfect light is close to noiseless but in anything but perfect light requires noise reduction. And since I let ISO auto-adjust if my shutter/aperture combination is too low for 800, I am sometimes photographing at up to 5000 and higher. (I try to keep the lighting so that I stay at 1600 ISO and under but things happen quickly when photographing birds at times.)
Recently, I'm finding that when I look at a file in DPP that there is either a little or a lot of noise. I've been wrestling with myself (not a pretty sight) about how much noise I need to get rid of to make the image look OK. I'm always wondering if a pixel peeping web friend will hassle me about the noise and if that matters. I also sometimes look at a photo a week later and think darn, I should have removed more noise. And above all that, the noise isn't usually visible in a printed photo and so I start to think what is my goal really.
Anyway, this is an internal struggle that I have. I'm coming to realize that some noise is OK just like grain was OK and even desirable for artistic reasons when I used to take photos with Tri-X back in the film days.
I'm curious what others think. I'm pretty sure this is a subjective issue.
Thanks, David