Extreme noise in RAW

I must be doing something wrong. I shoot lots of sports but never volleyball until yesterday. HS gym light req'd RAW and underexposure of about 1-1/3 stops at 1600 ISO. So in ACR I changed exposure and it brought out extreme noise. I have seen others here post examples of 1600 and it doesn't look nearly as noisy. I have used Noise Ninja to significantly reduce noise on my selects, but should they really be THIS noisy to begin with? Details:

Camera: D200
Lens: 70-200VR
Aperture: 2.8
Shutter: 1/320
High ISO NR in Camera: High
Color Space: Adobe
Optimize Image: Normal
RAW Compression: Off

It is critical to avoid underexposure when shooting high ISO. If not noise will increase exponentially.

I always dial in a bit of overexposure when shooting in low light to be sure it doesnt happen.

You would have had to sacrifice some shutter speed to get the histogram where it needed to be, otherwise use a faster lens. You really can't expect much at ISO1600 with that much of an underexposure. There's no free lunch, and underexposure equals noise.
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Hours of tedium punctuated by seconds of chaos.

You have to get the exposure right at the higher ISO settings. -1 1/3 stops exposure ain't good even at ISO 200 but is at least 1 stop below forgivness at ISO 1600. In some settings you have to blow some highlights to keep the noise down.

Regards

RB
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http://www.pbase.com/rebond

Yeah, perhaps i'm asking too much of RAW. An excellent news photog here recommended RAW underexposure to me & said you could go 1.5-2 stops under and bring back with ACR. Of course, i understand newsprint forgives a lot of noise, but still...
Perhaps I'll just have to go with flash. Ugh.

James,

The D200 is extremely unforgiving of underexposure at High ISOs. Use fast glass, SB800, and don't be afraid of cranking it up to ISO3200. I think you'll be suprised how good ISO3200 can be when it's properly exposed.

Good Luck.

Chris

Trying to recover from undexposure will kill shots every time - especially if it's been by about 1+1/3 stops.

When shooting RAW, I've found I've been able to comfortably recover anything up to 1+1/3 stops OVERexposure, but only been able to boost an UNDERexposed shot by about 1/3 to 1/2 of a stop before noise really starts to show - something that gets progressively worse at higher ISO settings, naturally.

That said, your shot still has some latitude for recovery in post processing - here's the results of adjusting levels, using channel mixer to bring out some contrast and Noise Ninja to help smooth it all over; perfectly acceptable for print in most newspapers or magazines at typical publishing sizes IMO.



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http://www.vikingphotography.co.uk

James Conrad said:

I must be doing something wrong. I shoot lots of sports but never
volleyball until yesterday. HS gym light req'd RAW and
underexposure of about 1-1/3 stops at 1600 ISO.

Click to expand...

even after ACR adjustment the photo is still 1 stop underexposed. Looking at the histogram it seems that the total underexposure is close to 2 1/2 stops in luminosity.

James Conrad said:

High ISO NR in Camera: High

Click to expand...

does not matter with ACR, it ignores instructions on noise reduction you put into the nef.

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Julia

as others have said expose properly or get a faster lens - maybe a 85 1.8 - thats a pretty cheap alternative then just crop. I shoot basketball with my 50mm but im right under the hoop (for kids)

Luke

This cleans up quite nicely in Neat Image and Photoshop. It needs increase in contrast (using white point and black point), and some color balancing using Selective Color.



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http://www.pbase.com/bertramm
pbase & dpreview supporter

agree with others but,

I think it is better to use a lens with a smaller F number in volleyball shooting.

This one is F1.8, still it is not good.

James Conrad said:

Yeah, perhaps i'm asking too much of RAW. An excellent news photog
here recommended RAW underexposure to me & said you could go 1.5-2
stops under and bring back with ACR.

Click to expand...

That's the equivalent of "pushing" film. You exposed at -2IL and developped the film to raise its ISO value.

And that's exactly what you would be doing there! Exposing at -2IL and bringing back 2IL under RAW post-processing is almost equivalent to stepping up the ISO by 2 units.

So, 1600 ISO with 2 stops pushed in ACR (or any RAW processing software) is roughly equivalent to 6400 ISO. The noise is not that bad after all...

You cleaned up the image very nicely. Again, probably asking too much but i had been hoping to avoid too much work in post.

There are a couple of things you can do right away to correct that type of noise for that type of shots:

First, I see you have fired the shot at 1/320s, which is wayy more than you need. I would slow down the shutter to at least half, possibly even as slow as 1/100 to 1/120

Second, I'm not sure if center weighted metering is the way to go for that shot, considering the amount of air you've put around the players, I'd go for full matrix metering instead. It's hard to beat the D200's metering in that type of shots, so usually I don't try to.

Third, and this is only if you're not already doing it, try to push your histogram more to the middle, prefereably to the right, if the scene allows it. The D200 is a mean s-o-b when it comes to underexposure in low light conditions, take several test shots from where you are, looking at the histogram after each shot until you've put that mountain smack in the middle of the chart. That'll help you a ton against color noise, and ease up a little on the chroma noise.

Last, and this is probably something I may be wrong about, but I have a fairly strong feeling that they did something with noise in high ISO with the 2.0 Firmware update. I usually test cameras for noise in my cellar, where the only light source is a 60w light bulb, and after the firmware update, I've had just about no color noise on my images. I could be wrong, but then again, it doesen't hurt to upgrade your firmware anyways.

Anyways, the framing was nice on that photo, so I wish you good luck with further attemts - you'll get it right!

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The sixth sick shiek's sixth sheep's sick
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Stuff about me at: http://www.digitaldias.com

Likewise I always set +0.3 when using ISO 1600 and get pretty clean images and just the occasional blown highlight. Under exposing at high ISO is a no-no.

-JohnK.

Thanks, Pedro. I used the center-weighted to meter off of a grey mat that looked pretty close to 18% & then just stayed with manual for the remainder of the shoot, since lighting was pretty even in the gym. As for shutter speed, the example I showed was pretty static but when the ball started bouncing around & people were striking, i found that there was nearly unacceptable motion blur even at 1/320.

I just updated my firmware this morning - hopefully you're right.

I'm shooting HS football tonight & see if I can put some of these tips to use!

Thanks again, everyone.

if you will be shooting under FL lights again keep your shutter speed at multiples of 1/30, but not faster then 1/120 because the mains is 60Hz, and FL lights cycle at twice that frequency, 120Hz. You will have more consistent white balance and exposure.

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Julia

Here is a "must" read from the Nikonians forum on using 3rd party RAW converters:
http://www.nikonians.org/dcforum/DCForumID36/16777.html

When I first used ACR to convert NEFs, I was dismayed at the high levels of noise at high ISO. If I used NC for NEF conversion, the pictures were MUCH cleaner. Turns out that the default automatic settings that ACR uses to convert NEFs were the source of the problem. I've used some of the suggested settings found in these forums for ACR conversion of NEFs, and the results were much, much better; comparable (almost!) to NC. This is why I still use NC for NEF conversion and exposure adjustments, then CS2 for final processing.

Mind quickly sharing how you achieved it?

Still struggling getting the results I want with Neat Image ...

1. Change from 8 bits/pixel to 16 bits/pixel mode
2. Create a levels adjustment layer
3. Dragged the white output level slider to the leftmost tip of the histogram

4. Clicked the white point levels tool on one of the stairs to eliminate the colour cast
5. Created a channel mixer layer
6. Loaded the channel mixer preset for Grayscale Blues
7. Changed the blend mode of the channel mixer layer to Soft Light
8. Altered the opacity of the channel mixer layer to about 60% IIRC
9. Flattened the layers
10. Ran NoiseNinja, set to auto profile the image
11. Re-converted to 8 bits / pixel

And that's it - all in all, it took about two minutes or less.
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http://www.vikingphotography.co.uk