[mouldy101]

Hi all,

Have been taking some long exposure photos, areas of which are quite dark, and have suffered a lot from noise. I have two questions

1. At what point at 100iso would you expect to get noise in photos?? I'm worried I am suffering a little too much

2. I know there are plugins such as noise ninja, would they get rid of long exposure noise at low ISO?? Which ones would people recommend???

Thanks in advance guys,

Matt

[Charlotte]

Matt,

What lens/es are you using for this?

What aperture/shutter speed?

What subject?

Indoors or outdoors?

What time of day?

Any other info you think may be relevant; you asked a pretty general question, but "it all depends"

The problem with noise ninja etc. is that whilst they do help to filter out noise, they also filter out other image detail (to varying degrees) ... best to avoid noise in the first place, if you can. Obviously that's not always possible.

If noise is in a plain area, like sky, then you can manually get rid of noise fairly easily by using the median filter (which is really just a blur effect, but a good one for getting rid of noise).

[mouldy101]

Thanks for your reply Charlotte

Landscapes, dusk/night, f19-22, 25secs+.

Essentially I've taken a couple of lovely landscapes/sunsets and would love to enlarge them, but the noise in the foreground is really ovious, had a play with PS, luminance smooting remove noise etc. and got some ok results, but want to know whether it would be worth my while trying something else???

Cheers all.

Matt

[Charlotte]

First thing I notice Matt is your aperture ... you're going to get lots of noise with a small aperture in low light. Try opening up to at least f/11 or even f/8 for better results Your DoF will obviously suffer for landscape shots, but if you use a wide angle lens you should get reasonable DoF, if you use hyperfocal focusing. I would think that by shooting landscapes at dusk you'd be after capturing shape + colour rather than detail anyway.

Don't forget that the law of reciprocity fails at shutter speeds of 1 sec or more, so you need to compensate for that by setting a longer shutter speed than is indicated by your camera's meter - which is how come your pic's are quite dark.

Dark areas + dark colours are where you'll get noise.

[Charlotte]

Also, your camera should have a noise reduction (NR) option, which you could try using for long exposures.

[JMitchell]

If you want a NR program, there are some good ones. J Sotelo just posted up the NoiseWare Community Edition in downloads which I duly downloaded and tested, very good , and free

[mouldy101]

thank you all very much, great advice as always.... I shall have a look at those downloads Jack

Matt