A2 "Noise" not a bad thing

Love my A2. But from reading lots of the posts here "pixel noise" and its appearance at higher ISO settings seems to be a big problem for lots here on the forum.

I guess I grew up in the days of Tri-X, GAF-500, and High-Speed Ektrachrome. Back when, you were grateful that you could get a good hand-held shot - film grain bedamned! Now, with the A2 and its internal image stabilization... wow!

I know the A2 is not the latest-greatest (I bought mine well before the 7D was released), but I'm pretty pleased with the images this camera creates. In fact, I'm constantly amazed.

Below is a shot I took one evening. I was driving home from a day spent working on my sailboat, and just happened to have the A2 in the backseat. No tripod. No forethought. Just grabbed the camera, cranked up the ISO setting and hoped for the best. If memory serves, this is hand-held at about 1/10 sec exposure:



Tech notes: Image size reduced in PS CS about 60%, bicubic sharpen.

Me? I like the resulting pixel noise. Comments, etc., encouraged!

Your shot is great.

I think people - nobody in particular - are too picky about noise. Too often noise reduction is overused and the resulting image looks like plastic.

In my film days I sometimes used to shoot ISO 1600 slide film to emphasis grain for effect. Even using a slide copier to dupe ISO 100 shots to ISO 1600 film!
--
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Greg

I think the major objection is to the red, blue, green color in the noise rather than the noise itself.

The color removal technique talked about in one of the other recent threads (make a copy of the Background layer in Photoshop, Gaussian blur the copy layer and then put it in Color mode) works very nicely to remove the color from the noise and then the noise look a lot more acceptably like film grain.
****

You are of course right, noise does not look like grain but I still don't think we should object to it as a knee jerk reaction.
--
When you've got a moment, have a look at my site:
http://www.wrightphotos.co.uk

Winner of the South West Rural section of the BBC's Picture of Britain Competition.

Greg

wait a minute...

sure it's got noise, but my eyes aren't melting...

could you be right? Could we all be looking for slinky/smooth images unneccessarily?

hmmm....

Anyway, nice shot, and the 'digital grain' doesn't look obnoxious here. I think it's all about what you want from the image.

The important thing is to GET the picture.

Get the picture?

Allen

--
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'Shut up 'n play yer guitar'

• Frank Zappa

JimWolcott said:

I guess I grew up in the days of Tri-X, GAF-500, and High-Speed
Ektrachrome. Back when, you were grateful that you could get a
good hand-held shot - film grain bedamned! Now, with the A2 and
its internal image stabilization... wow!

Click to expand...

Me too, but the noise you get from the Ax's sensor is a very annoying (to me, anyway) chroma noise which is a far cry from the grain in b/w film. Besides which, the Ax's ISO 400 is about as bad as film ISO800 or 1600 as well.

Shooting in Raw and knocking down the colour noise via the Raw converter helps a lot, though.

JimWolcott said:

I know the A2 is not the latest-greatest (I bought mine well before
the 7D was released), but I'm pretty pleased with the images this
camera creates. In fact, I'm constantly amazed.

Click to expand...

I still shoot with my A1 but my D70 also gets a lot of use, too.

JimWolcott said:

Below is a shot I took one evening. I was driving home from a day
spent working on my sailboat, and just happened to have the A2 in
the backseat. No tripod. No forethought. Just grabbed the
camera, cranked up the ISO setting and hoped for the best. If
memory serves, this is hand-held at about 1/10 sec exposure:

Click to expand...

That looks very much like the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver.

This ISN'T the Fraser Valley...it's half an hour west, in Richmond, looking north to Vancouver with Grouse Mtn in the background.



But the background mtn geography is similar.

larsbc

DigitalDick said:

I think the major objection is to the red, blue, green color in the
noise rather than the noise itself.
The color removal technique talked about in one of the other recent
threads (make a copy of the Background layer in Photoshop, Gaussian
blur the copy layer and then put it in Color mode) works very
nicely to remove the color from the noise and then the noise look a
lot more acceptably like film grain.
****

Click to expand...

my technique is the same but to use noise ninja on the upper layer. set blending mode to colour... colour noise gone but detail retained and some very pleasant monochromatic noise.

The noise issue is blown up out of proportion by many. What they tend to forget is the limited field of view of the human eye. And I don't mean the angle at which our eyes see anything, but the angle at which we see things in focus, which is around 15 to 20 degrees (you can check it yourself by trying to see this entire line you are reading now in focus. Depending on the size of your screen and your distance to it, you probably can't see the end of the line in focus when you are looking at the beginning of that line. You will have to move your eyeball).

So what does that mean? Well, everybody nowadays wants to blow up their pictures to lets say poster format. Great! But if you stand 3 feet away from it, you will only be able to see a very small portion in focus and yes you will be able to see noise. But you won't be able to see the whole picture which is what it's all about. To see the whole picture you would have to stand back a few yards. Noise would then be much less of a problem. So ..... for the noise fetishists out there, kreep up as close to the image at hand and be disgusted about the noise. You will have to like abstracts ofcourse and should not be interested in the whole picture. And for the viewers who want to see things more in perspective, don't bother about noise to much. As some reactions explained, lots can be done to make it acceptable en non-obtrusive.

Ron

If you want to get rid of the chromatic noise, just download Noiseware Community version off the web (It's free) and just apply the default setting. You will be amazed at the results. You will still see the slight grainy effect, but will get rid of the chroma noise. I have Noiseware with an icon on my desktop and simply retrieve my photos with this software, correct for noise, save it, and then bring it back into photoshop to complete any other enhancements such as sharpening etc.

Just check those so popular ultrazooms... with their lacking wide angles and menus surfing user interfaces. (and then those are claimed to be prosumers)

Neither is Fuji's S9000/9500 really much better, it's results are achieved with very heavy processing.
Here's some RAW shots converted with ACR.

http://www.videozona.ru/photo_tests/Reviews/PanasonicFZ30/PanasonicFZ30_page05.asp

And if you compare Fuji to A200 which has same sensor as A2 with better incamera processing difference gets small:
http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/minolta/dimage_a200-review/
http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/fuji/finepix_s9000-review/

--
Esa 'E.T' Tuunanen

rhollander2 wrote:
[snip]

rhollander2 said:

yards. Noise would then be much less of a problem. So ..... for the
noise fetishists out there, kreep up as close to the image at hand
and be disgusted about the noise. You will have to like abstracts
ofcourse and should not be interested in the whole picture. And for
the viewers who want to see things more in perspective, don't
bother about noise to much. As some reactions explained, lots can
be done to make it acceptable en non-obtrusive.

Click to expand...

I've made 4x6 prints from ISO 400 shots from my A1 (in BW, I might add) and the noise is very obvious. When I shoot in RAW and reduce the colour noise, that helps a lot and produces more film-like grain noise, but it is still obvious (to a photographer) at 4x6 sizes. Colour noise is obvious to anyone. I'm not saying it's the end of the world but OTOH I'd love to get rid of it.

BTW, I'm not 100% against all noise. At times, I've added noise to my images to get a grainier look.

larsbc

I agree that the shot is interesting with the noise and not unpleasant, but given the choice, I would want to see the image without the noise, and I think the image would be much improved without it.

--
Steve W

I agree completely. But some focus so hard on noise that they forget to look at the actual picture which is a pitty.

What I forgot in my previous post is, that the pixel(c)ra(z)ce is not a bad thing for the noise issue. Yes, it is true that smaller pixels of small sensors produce more noise, but on the other hand, the imagedata gets larger and images can be enlarged more. And as I tried to explain, larger pictures can only be viewed fully from a certain distance. It also works the other way round. If you (down)size a 3 MP picture to lets say 5x8 and do the same from an 8 MP picture while both have the same amount of noise, the 8 MP picture will look cleaner, because the noise is 'compressed' (actually it is not compressed but less enlarged).

This can be seen clearly with the 5 Mp Sony sensor inside the A1 and the 8 Mp Sony sensor in the A2. Both have the same noise characteristics and the A2 should produce more noise because of the smaller pixels (and it does). But still in small and medium sized prints the noise of the A2 is less obtrusive because of the 'compression'.

Can't wait for the noiseless sensor, just to stop all the noise debates so everybody can focus on the essence of photography (being ...?). But then again, people will find other issues to nitpick about ...

JimWolcott said:

Love my A2. But from reading lots of the posts here "pixel noise"
and its appearance at higher ISO settings seems to be a big problem
for lots here on the forum.

Click to expand...

I viewed the EXIF on your photo and noticed that your ISO setting was at 200. I would say that is very unacceptable at ISO200. Here is the rest of the EXIF Data:

Image Description: KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA
Model: DiMAGE A2
Exposure Time: 1.3 Sec
F Number: F4.5
Exposure Program: Aperature Priority
ISO Speed Rating: 200
Lens Focal Length: 17mm
Date Time Original: 2004:09:26 19:24:05
Software: Adobe Photoshop CS Windows

I recently sold my A2, but I got much better results at ISO200.

JimWolcott said:

Below is a shot I took one evening. I was driving home from a day
spent working on my sailboat, and just happened to have the A2 in
the backseat. No tripod. No forethought. Just grabbed the
camera, cranked up the ISO setting and hoped for the best. If
memory serves, this is hand-held at about 1/10 sec exposure:

Click to expand...

JimWolcott said:

Tech notes: Image size reduced in PS CS about 60%, bicubic sharpen.

Me? I like the resulting pixel noise. Comments, etc., encouraged!

Click to expand...

--



Russell Homes
http://www.focusingonflorida.com

Noise, I guess, is a matter of taste. That's a lovely photograph, but I can't help but wonder how much nicer it would look with out all the color splotching and some increased clarity.

Also- I'm sure that my A2's ISO200 shots look way cleaner that that. I expect that the sharpening you added increased the visible noise level quite a bit. To not accentuate the noise, when I use Photoshop's USM, I bump up the level (the 3rd item) to 5 or 10.

I've tried the previously suggested method, and that does a pretty fair job at reducing the color blotching and making the noise look a lot more like film grain- which I believe we have a near unanimous agreement that it's more pleasing to the eye.

--

I just downloaded Noiseware Community version off the web and I am amazed at the results!!!

Yesterday I took my A200 downtown at night to do some low light shots at ISO 800 - I used Noisware and the results were really stunning. They look like coming out from a different camera (DSLR).
So I´ll stay with my A200 for a while ... no reason to upgrade left!
Thank you very much for the hint !!!

Many are afraid to use a noise reduction software (such as Noiseware) because they fear loosing details. If the software is used in moderation you will in fact notice more details in your prints mainly because of the elimination of chroma noise which creates blotches on your photo. Give it a try, its free.