Black and white conversions of high ISO shots

Calina

I was out in really dark and dank conditions today and because shutter speeds were abysmal, I had to crank up the ISO to get reasonable non-blurry exposures.

Usually, the ISO is limited to aroudn 200, maybe 400 at the worst. I wouldn't normally stay out in the conditions we had between 1 and 3 (the light improved but the wind didn't so even when the sun came out there wasn't much point in hanging around). Today I shot up to 800. But the colour shots are slightly flat because the light was truly awful. I usually convert these things to black and white - it's a known habit with me - Hey Cal, not great weather, suppose a lot of black and white shots, right?

Anyway, I'm finding that the digital noise from the high ISO makes the black and white conversions rather grainy and lacking in pizazz and I'd be interested to know if anyone else has similar issues. I am not a great fan of noise reduction software, probably because I don't have time to tune them up and make them run perfectly. also, I make the subjects look a bit bubbly.

Am I the only person who tries to convert high ISO to black and white? If not, how do you handle the noise do you run it through Noise Ninja or similar, or through some sort of sharpening?

I'd be interested to hear what other people do. There was a guy on the beach with a 2.8 70-200 and he said he was playing with slow shutter speed which leads me to think even 2.8 wasn't enough. I know that 1.8 was problematic because I played with the 50mm for a bit and still didn't get what I wanted.

This is a case in point. I just failed to get the contrasts to work the way I wanted so bashed the image into a near full silhouette instead.



Basically if I boost up the contrast to do a bnw conversion it's a signal failure.

5uspect

Sharpening and increasing contrast will only make matters worse. You need to blur noise and not accentuate it. There are lots of techniques for dealing with noise. Converting to B&W is one way of getting rid of chroma noise but you're still left with luminance noise.

For example you could duplicate your layer and apply some Gaussian blur to it and then try and blend it onto the original using the colour blend mode. You could switch to LAB colour space and can blur the A and B channels which contain the colour data.

EDIT: here's a tutorial that does something similar
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/techniques/chrom-noise.shtml

ThOnda

Well, that's what I do all the time. Scans I am getting are full of noise of incorrect scan/exposure.
I am trying to use the grain (noise in BW) as basic elements of the picture. For the first, there is layer with saturation set to zero and after that, I am working below that layer. Levels, Curves, Selective Colour. That's mostly what I do.
I know that your basic are in film, so I suppose you shouldn't have issues with grain. Personally, sometimes I am increasing amount of grain in my pictures to make them more raw-ish
And the picture above - the main figure is a little too much blurred. Sorry.

Calina

I know it's less than sharp. :mad: It's less than sharp courtesy of the lack of shutter speed.

Personally I am looking at finding a way of emigrating to somewhere like Venezuela where I don't have to deal with the lighting conditions I had to play with today.

5uspect

Grain can work well if it looks suitably gaussian as in film. Unfortunately sensor noise is quite uniform (pattern noise). Perhaps you could go the other extreme and hide the pattern noise with large amounts of photoshop noise?