Why do my photos turn out noisy and smudgy??

af_thefragile

Lately I've noticed many of my photos have a lot of noise and smudginess in them. Like take for example these pics I shot recently:




They've both been taken at ISO100 and if you zoom in (or look closely) there's a good amount of noise in the image which one shouldn't expect at such a low ISO... So why is that?? What can I do make the images clearer and less noisy??

magicbastarder

is that jpg straight out of the camera, or was that processed from RAW by you?

DaireQuinlan

They look really underexposed to me. Looks like you exposed correctly for the sky leaving the rest a couple of stops under and then bumped them up in post hence the noise.

magicbastarder

i was thinking along those lines too.

secman

Looks like they were shot using f1.8 which would not be usually used when taking landscape shots ..... more like f8 to f11. depending on scene and light etc.

af_thefragile

Shot the pics in raw and then used Adobe Camera RAW to process them.

It is true I didn't have a graduated filter with me so I couldn't expose the foregroung properly without blowing out the sky and didn't have a tripod to go HDR. Also because of the low light and lack of tripod f1.8 was all I could shoot at...

So if I wouldn't have bumped up the exposure in post, I wouldn't be seeing all that noise?? I understand the photo is a bit smudgy because I shot it at f1.8 but I dont get why it's so noisy at iso100...

Also how would you make sure you get good exposure for such a scene without blowing out the sky if you don't have a graduated filter?

DaireQuinlan

af_thefragile wrote: »

Also how would you make sure you get good exposure for such a scene without blowing out the sky if you don't have a graduated filter?

Shoot film

Seriously though, given your restrictions, not a lot. I'd shoot raw and try and overexpose the sky as much as possible without blowing it, which might give you a reasonable exposure on the ground. You could try firing off a couple of shots handheld at different exposures and combine them in post, probably have to align and crop a bit or something.

magicbastarder

af_thefragile wrote: »

So if I wouldn't have bumped up the exposure in post, I wouldn't be seeing all that noise?? I understand the photo is a bit smudgy because I shot it at f1.8 but I dont get why it's so noisy at iso100...

it's noisy because you essentially greatly amplifed a weak signal, i.e. the shadows. which is the source of noise; it's from a weak signal being amplified.

exposing at 3200 ASA, f1.8 and 1/40th sec means you get the same amount of light captured on the sensor as exposing at 100ASA with the same f stop and shutter speed - selecting say 3200 ASA is just a way of telling the camera it is going to have to do more with the same amount of light, so it does the amplification in camera (and you get a grainy result), whereas you did it in post - and got a similar result.

magicbastarder

DaireQuinlan wrote: »

You could try firing off a couple of shots handheld at different exposures and combine them in post, probably have to align and crop a bit or something.

OMFG DQ suggested HDR!

DaireQuinlan

magicbastarder wrote: »

OMFG DQ suggested HDR!

no no no ! I meant to eh ... shoot two frames of film and uh ... cross process them and then ... and then ... overlay them in the darkroom and there you go bobs your uncle.

phew.

dirtyghettokid

magicbastarder wrote: »

OMFG DQ suggested HDR!

*ahem* it could be exposure blending! and NOT hdr!

Gehad_JoyRider

I had a look at the original, first rule shoot in RAW, now I know there has been a recent few mails on some places saying its ok but its not, if you look at your original, you can see some fringing aka C/A on the bottom right hand corner...

Left corner to me looks slightly unsharp below the light house it seems to be a little soft...

If I was processing that, I'd add about to 6 to 12in clarity just to give the water a nice shine seems very murkey. I'd remove the C/A then Id probably dodge the sky...at about 14% opacity.

Merge Layers, then I'd add some curves just linear contrast, after that id leave.

The thing is its ` sunset shots are always going to be either over exposed to get perfect exposher requires you to take time with your metering, to get it right but also 100 iso is not the most important id some times up my iso because I want to catch more ambient light.Again how you meter really reflects to your out come on a sunset shot.

Kenny Logins

Gehad_JoyRider wrote: »

I had a look at the original, first rule shoot in RAW...

Did.

af_thefragile

Gehad_JoyRider wrote: »

I had a look at the original, first rule shoot in RAW, now I know there has been a recent few mails on some places saying its ok but its not, if you look at your original, you can see some fringing aka C/A on the bottom right hand corner...

Left corner to me looks slightly unsharp below the light house it seems to be a little soft...

If I was processing that, I'd add about to 6 to 12in clarity just to give the water a nice shine seems very murkey. I'd remove the C/A then Id probably dodge the sky...at about 14% opacity.

Merge Layers, then I'd add some curves just linear contrast, after that id leave.

The thing is its ` sunset shots are always going to be either over exposed to get perfect exposher requires you to take time with your metering, to get it right but also 100 iso is not the most important id some times up my iso because I want to catch more ambient light.Again how you meter really reflects to your out come on a sunset shot.

Thanks, I'm not very good at photoshop but i'll give this a try and see if i get a better result!

I did shoot it at raw (I shoot everything in RAW!). I suppose I could have exposed the original by another stop without blowing up the sky. The only problem was I didn't have a tripod with me so couldn't have a longer shutter speed but I guess I could have bumped the ISO...

Hmm, I'm gonna go back one of these days and take that shot again this time with a tripod and see if I can get better results...

I just wanted to understand why there was so much noise even when I shot it at ISO100 but I suppose as magicbastarder said it was because I had to bump up the exposure in post which resulted in a more noisy image.

Here's the original raw of another image I took in the sequence (which I think is the cleanest and sharpest one I managed to take) if anyone wants to have a look at it and tell me what I could do better... Thanks!
IMG_0707.CR2

dirtyghettokid

not saying this is any better, it's just what i would have done with it. not sure what you mean by smudginess?

mikka631

Hope you don't mind but I had a quick play around in LR5 with the image. I will delete if you wish.

dirtyghettokid

it's cool to see different versions!
i used aperture 3.0 for mine, btw!

mikka631

Yeah, interesting to see different takes on this

af_thefragile

Nope, got no problem with you guys having a go at it. It's very interesting to see the different takes on the pic.
Can you guys also say what you did with the pic?
Here's how I edited it in Adobe Camera Raw:


I like how mikka631 made it very bright without blowing out the sky too much!

Logie-1

Maybe a bit OTT:)

Gehad_JoyRider

Heres how I'd finish it i think i would of used bracketing for a shot like this and merged them with out hdr....

mikka631

Not very good when it comes to editing but for my version I did the following in Lightroom 5.2

Increased exposure +2 on the whole image
Added Clarity +10
Increased Saturation +48
Gradient filter over the sky decreased exposure -2.5
Minor tweaks in Tone Curve
Noise Reduction Luminance 25
Landscape Sharpening Preset Strong (Matt Kloskowski)
*******************************************
Finished in Elements 12
Cropped to 1000px wide @ 72ppi
Unsharp Mask to counter softening when compressing to jpg

/Mick

dirtyghettokid

for my version --

> in aperture
1. straightened horizon
2. brought the exposure down by 1/3rd stop
3. brought saturation up to 1.18 (1.0 is default)
4. brought vibrancy up to 0.2 (0.0 is default)

> opened in colo(u)r efex pro
5. neutral density filter over sky
6. detail extractor default settings

that's about it. i opened it up in photoshop then to check levels.