Noisy? It's all about processing.

A couple of posters recently (in two different threads) have commented that the M6II at ISO 100 is noisy. This surprised me, because my experience with the M6II is that it has the best noise control of all the Canon APS-C sensors I've used, which stretch all the way back to the 6.3MP sensor on the original Digital Rebel. So I looked at the images that were claimed to be noisy (one in the OOF background, the other in the blue sky). Although they didn't look excessively noisy to me, they did display more noise than I am used to seeing in my own ISO images. So, I did a comparison test with a few of the images that I shot on my first day with the M6II. I used my standard processing, which includes some shadow and highlight adjustment, sharpening, and some clarity, dehaze, and vibrance. And then I reprocessed them with one parameter adjusted. Here are 100% crops from one, showing the OOF background:

OOF area is definitely more noisy on this version

And another, with a darker OOF background, which usually shows more noise. One of the posts compared a dark OOF background from the M6II with a light OOF background from the M5. Of course the darker one will show more noise:

The darker OOF area brings out the noise difference even more here

And finally one with blue sky:

A lot more noise in the blue sky here

The only processing difference between the two crops in each pair is the setting of the masking slider in the sharpening panel of Lightroom. The first one in each pair is set at 75, and the second at 0. 75 might be too high for some people, but I find that I'm still able to sharpen the areas I want with that setting. The mask prevents sharpening from being applied to OOF areas or other areas lacking detail. If you hold down the option key while moving the slider, you'll get a grayscale image, showing you which parts of the image are subject to sharpening. See what a difference the mask makes. In my experience, most people who complain about noise are using global sharpening, which induces the appearance of noise. The sharpening slider allows you to sharpen only the areas of the image that have a certain level of detail. Before LR included it, you had to use multiple layers in Photoshop to do selective sharpening. Now, except in very rare cases, the masking slider in LR gives results that are perfectly fine. Some of the other processing settings that I like to use (like clarity and dehaze) also induce a little noise, but I find the tradeoff more than acceptable, especially because I'm not usually viewing my images at 100% from a foot or two away. But with sharpening, I always use a mask. If the mask prevents some areas from being as sharp as I want, I can always use the adjustment brush to paint back in the sharpening, but I almost never need to do that.

If you want the best noise performance that your sensor is capable of, avoid global sharpening. And, if you want to compare the results from different sensors, make sure you're looking at the same (or at least very similar) scenes, with the same processing applied.