what are best steps to process high ISO image?

[pat lillich]

haven't gotten out to take photos for a few days due to what seems like the first rain of the winter here.... so when this Acorn Woodpecker came in to the suet feeder on our patio I wanted to at least try to get some pics. But the light was nonexistent.

the image isn't very good, but I wanted to play with it anyway (I love the blue/green on its back - hadn't noticed that before) and I realized that shadows & highlights, Nik color effects tonal contrast and Nik Sharpener were all emphasizing the noise in the dark feathers and bill. (cloned some oof twigs out of top left and right - cropped in LR)

I was wondering what steps/tools folks use if they want to try to clean up a marginal high iso image? the image was shot far enough to the right to have blinkies in the sky, but i think I should have pushed it further.

1/800 sec at f/4, iso 1250, 500 mm (ef500mm f/4) manual, hh, 1dmk4

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Pat, nice catch of the acorn woody - always a fun bird to photograph! Your ISO setting is not that high for the 1D, but noise needs to be dealt with at the very beginning of your workflow. As you have pointed out, further processing without NR will only magnify any noise that is present. Another bonus of applying NR at the very beginning is that your file size will be smaller after applying it. In this image, the bright bg is more distracting than any noise. I would suggest toning it down. Do you have the bird and perch on a separate layer?

[pat lillich]

Kerry, when i get home from work today i'll start fresh. I'll move the bird and tree to its own layer (or anyway i'll make a layer with only the bird and tree on it above the background layer).

When you say deal with NR first, are you suggesting to try NR on the whole image (maybe mask out the eyes and bill and some other fine detail areas) before trying the SH, tonal detail and sharpening?

thank you for your suggestions, I've avoided high iso because i didn't like the results on my much loved nikon 300. I know that this camera handles it much better, and with perfect exposure have gotten some keepers at iso 1000, but i would love to learn how to rescue a less well captured image.

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

Pat,

Greetings. NR software these days are pretty good. Kerry has it right when he says NR needs to be done at the beginning of your workflow. But also your workflow may end up emphasizing the noise remaining after your initial NR and may require a second pass later.

Also, to my eye, color noise tends to have a greater negative impact than luminance noise. Often a NR pass just targeted at the color noise will work (with luminance noise passing off as fine feather detail ). I think to some extent this is true of your OP.

Here's a version passed through just color NR (Topaz Denoise at a setting of .50 on Clean Color only - in a range of 0 - 1.0):



Lightroom, too, has a separate color NR that works pretty good. I'm guessing most recently release NR packages work well (be wary of older packages, the bar has been raised quite a bit over the last year or two).

Luminance NR is best balanced against fine detail which may be easy or hard depending on your software. Topaz Denoise for instance offers adjustments for detailing against NR which makes it pretty easy rather than switching back and forth betweed NR and detailing (which is what I used to do out of necessity just a couple of years ago).

One workflow point... NR is pixel-peeping work, that is, it needs to be done at 100% or greater.

By the way, jpeg compression tends to increase visible noise. Topaz has a setting in their Dejpeg tool which also pretty effectively removed the color noise from your posted image with a different take, perhaps better, on the detail. Interesting.

Cheers,

-Michael-

[pat lillich]

quick try using Michael and Kerry's suggestions... any better? (did some NR in LR, and then again in PS before any other PP)

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

Pat,

The repost looks good to me... perhaps the darker feathers could bear some additonal detailing (either with curves or other tools and/or sharpening)... as it doesn't appear once noisy...

I would think that the upper bounds on noise for the 1dmk4 is higher than 1250, given sufficient NR processing technique.

Cheers,

-Michael-

[pat lillich]

hey Michael - I'm certain you are right, the idmk4 is amazing --- but I have this knee-jerk negative reaction to graininess (when i wasn't planning on graininess) and so i am overly cautious about iso. So this is part of "desensitizing" myself and learning to use the tools available. besides, i loved this dorky woodpecker and wanted to see how good i could get him to look!