Bad Noise in Low Light ... is this normal

Shoei said:

Hi All,

First of all thanks for the support, this group has been great.

Continuing my test of the SD10 in low light I went for a drive this
evening at dusk and shot a few images. After looking at the images
I've noticed a lot of Green noise. I thought this had been
corrected in the SD-10 so I thought I'd post and find out if it is
so.

Here are the first two "cityscape" shots. The first is as it came
out of the camera (no auto or custom SPP tweaks), the second (which
shows up the noise) was with a little "fill light" tweaking in SPP.

http://www.pbase.com/image/28520800
http://www.pbase.com/image/28520889

I was a little confused about this, and so I shot an F20 15sec
exposure of the front of my house. The results were absolutely
terrible (unusable). This is the result as it came from the Camera
(no auto or custom SPP tweaks).

http://www.pbase.com/image/28520980

Is this normal ?
Is anyone else seeing this
Is it something I'm doing wrong ?
have I picked up a lemon ?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated

Regards,

Mark

--
Enjoy Life ......
.... this is NOT a rehearsal !!!

Click to expand...

Shoei said:

Hi All,

First of all thanks for the support, this group has been great.

Continuing my test of the SD10 in low light I went for a drive this
evening at dusk and shot a few images. After looking at the images
I've noticed a lot of Green noise. I thought this had been
corrected in the SD-10 so I thought I'd post and find out if it is
so.

Here are the first two "cityscape" shots. The first is as it came
out of the camera (no auto or custom SPP tweaks), the second (which
shows up the noise) was with a little "fill light" tweaking in SPP.

http://www.pbase.com/image/28520800
http://www.pbase.com/image/28520889

I was a little confused about this, and so I shot an F20 15sec
exposure of the front of my house. The results were absolutely
terrible (unusable). This is the result as it came from the Camera
(no auto or custom SPP tweaks).

http://www.pbase.com/image/28520980

Is this normal ?
Is anyone else seeing this
Is it something I'm doing wrong ?
have I picked up a lemon ?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated

Regards,

Mark

--
Enjoy Life ......
.... this is NOT a rehearsal !!!

Click to expand...

Ulli R said:

a friend of me send his SD10 to sigma-germany - for killing the
noise-problem and set the "bulb"-funktion to the right funktion (so
long as you press)

now the cam ist back.......

the "bulb" is working with 15 secound (no change)
and the "green" noise is now a "blue" noise!!
a work of 3 weeks by sigma-service!

Ulli

(sorry about my english)

Shoei said:

Hi All,

First of all thanks for the support, this group has been great.

Continuing my test of the SD10 in low light I went for a drive this
evening at dusk and shot a few images. After looking at the images
I've noticed a lot of Green noise. I thought this had been
corrected in the SD-10 so I thought I'd post and find out if it is
so.

Here are the first two "cityscape" shots. The first is as it came
out of the camera (no auto or custom SPP tweaks), the second (which
shows up the noise) was with a little "fill light" tweaking in SPP.

http://www.pbase.com/image/28520800
http://www.pbase.com/image/28520889

I was a little confused about this, and so I shot an F20 15sec
exposure of the front of my house. The results were absolutely
terrible (unusable). This is the result as it came from the Camera
(no auto or custom SPP tweaks).

http://www.pbase.com/image/28520980

Is this normal ?
Is anyone else seeing this
Is it something I'm doing wrong ?
have I picked up a lemon ?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated

Regards,

Mark

--
Enjoy Life ......
.... this is NOT a rehearsal !!!

Click to expand...

--
Sorry, i will learn more english

Click to expand...

Shoei said:

So does this mean even though the Sigma comes with exposures up to
30 seconds and allegedly improved low light performance in the
SD10, you can't use them longer than about 2.5 seconds without
expecting a lot of really bad noise and above 5-10 secs it's
unusable !!!

Now I'm particularly unhappy. It also means Phils review of the low
light performance was spot on.

please someone tell me I am doing something wrong and it's not the
SD10 camera in general! Should I send it back to Sigma's
distributer in Australia to try to fix it or is it unfixable and I
should have gone for a different Camera. I really hope this can be
fixed (or at least alleviated).

in a word

AAaarrrgh !!!!

Cheers....

Shoei

Ulli R said:

a friend of me send his SD10 to sigma-germany - for killing the
noise-problem and set the "bulb"-funktion to the right funktion (so
long as you press)

now the cam ist back.......

the "bulb" is working with 15 secound (no change)
and the "green" noise is now a "blue" noise!!
a work of 3 weeks by sigma-service!

Ulli

(sorry about my english)

Shoei said:

Hi All,

First of all thanks for the support, this group has been great.

Continuing my test of the SD10 in low light I went for a drive this
evening at dusk and shot a few images. After looking at the images
I've noticed a lot of Green noise. I thought this had been
corrected in the SD-10 so I thought I'd post and find out if it is
so.

Here are the first two "cityscape" shots. The first is as it came
out of the camera (no auto or custom SPP tweaks), the second (which
shows up the noise) was with a little "fill light" tweaking in SPP.

http://www.pbase.com/image/28520800
http://www.pbase.com/image/28520889

I was a little confused about this, and so I shot an F20 15sec
exposure of the front of my house. The results were absolutely
terrible (unusable). This is the result as it came from the Camera
(no auto or custom SPP tweaks).

http://www.pbase.com/image/28520980

Is this normal ?
Is anyone else seeing this
Is it something I'm doing wrong ?
have I picked up a lemon ?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated

Regards,

Mark

--
Enjoy Life ......
.... this is NOT a rehearsal !!!

Click to expand...

--
Sorry, i will learn more english

Click to expand...

--
Enjoy Life ......
.... this is NOT a rehearsal !!!

Click to expand...

TJ Hanlon said:

Laurence posted a short tut on taking night shots that I found useful:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1027&message=8095146

Hope this helps.

tjh

Shoei said:

Hi All,

First of all thanks for the support, this group has been great.

Continuing my test of the SD10 in low light I went for a drive this
evening at dusk and shot a few images. After looking at the images
I've noticed a lot of Green noise. I thought this had been
corrected in the SD-10 so I thought I'd post and find out if it is
so.

Here are the first two "cityscape" shots. The first is as it came
out of the camera (no auto or custom SPP tweaks), the second (which
shows up the noise) was with a little "fill light" tweaking in SPP.

http://www.pbase.com/image/28520800
http://www.pbase.com/image/28520889

I was a little confused about this, and so I shot an F20 15sec
exposure of the front of my house. The results were absolutely
terrible (unusable). This is the result as it came from the Camera
(no auto or custom SPP tweaks).

http://www.pbase.com/image/28520980

Is this normal ?
Is anyone else seeing this
Is it something I'm doing wrong ?
have I picked up a lemon ?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated

Regards,

Mark

--
Enjoy Life ......
.... this is NOT a rehearsal !!!

Click to expand...

--
http://www.pbase.com/tjhanlon/

Click to expand...

Shoei said:

... In addition there was an observation of
a photo I posted a couple of days ago that the sky in it was
"blotchy". This was in full sunlight,
http://www.pbase.com/image/28456925

Click to expand...

Dominic Groß said:

As everybody could see from Phil's review the performance is not
good at all when you try to expose so long to turn night into day.
The SD9 was pretty usable till 3-4 seconds after the 2.0 firmware.
This SD9 image was f11 and 3 sec if I recall correctly.

http://www.pbase.com/image/22452350

The SD10 extended that range a bit. But exposing long (bigger than
10 sec) will still mean trouble.
--
http://www.pbase.com/sigmasd9/dominic_gross_sd10

Click to expand...

Just Looking said:

Shoei said:

... In addition there was an observation of
a photo I posted a couple of days ago that the sky in it was
"blotchy". This was in full sunlight,
http://www.pbase.com/image/28456925

Click to expand...

Shoei, your noise problems look to be a lot worse than normal to
me. This picture may be a clue to why.

It's shot in full sunlight, as is easy to see from the shadows.
But the exposure indicated in the Exif, 1/60 at f/4.5, is at least
four stops overexposed, relative to what would normally be expected
at ISO 100. This does not make sense with respect to any of my
experience with these cameras. That much exposure should make
blown-out skies, not noisy skies.

I think your camera has a serious problem.

j

Click to expand...

Just Looking said:

Shoei said:

... In addition there was an observation of
a photo I posted a couple of days ago that the sky in it was
"blotchy". This was in full sunlight,
http://www.pbase.com/image/28456925

Click to expand...

Shoei, your noise problems look to be a lot worse than normal to
me. This picture may be a clue to why.

It's shot in full sunlight, as is easy to see from the shadows.
But the exposure indicated in the Exif, 1/60 at f/4.5, is at least
four stops overexposed, relative to what would normally be expected
at ISO 100. This does not make sense with respect to any of my
experience with these cameras. That much exposure should make
blown-out skies, not noisy skies.

I think your camera has a serious problem.

j

Click to expand...

Yeti said:

I noticed on your exif that you don't use exposure bias most all
cameras tend to underexpose and that creates lots of noise bringing
up the exposure later in SPP doesn't work because the info is
already in the image.
Try to set the exposure bias to half a stop or one stop and have a
look at the histogram if it is too fare to the left give it a stop
more I see to it that most of the histogram is in the second third
to the right.
--
http://www.pbase.com/cbultmann

With an infinite number of monkeys pecking randomly at typewriters
for all eternity,
the works of Shakespeare would eventually be typed. My message: Two
monkeys,
ten minutes

Click to expand...

Shoei said:

bit of a case of "buyers remorse" about now.

Click to expand...

Shoei said:

Here are the first two "cityscape" shots. The first is as it came
out of the camera (no auto or custom SPP tweaks), the second (which
shows up the noise) was with a little "fill light" tweaking in SPP.

http://www.pbase.com/image/28520800
http://www.pbase.com/image/28520889

Click to expand...

Shoei said:

I was a little confused about this, and so I shot an F20 15sec
exposure of the front of my house. The results were absolutely
terrible (unusable). This is the result as it came from the Camera
(no auto or custom SPP tweaks).

http://www.pbase.com/image/28520980

Is this normal ?
Is anyone else seeing this
Is it something I'm doing wrong ?
have I picked up a lemon ?

Click to expand...

Adam-T said:

Adam-T said:

bit of a case of "buyers remorse" about now.

Click to expand...

This is one reason why I wouldn't pay the UK price for an SD10, the
SD9 is a total bargain at £550 but there was no way that I'd pay
Fuji S2 / 10D money asked for the SD10 until the body fittings,
buttons etc were of FAR better quality, they totally revamped the
insensitive 1-point AF, it ran off a 10D / D100 style Li-Ion
battery and they sorted the issues with the blue sky noise, long
exposures, high ISOs and other things which Bayer DSLRs do far
better..

Don't get me wrong, I love my Sigma, but it's an SD9 which with the
two kit lenses cost less than a 300D body or one of the 8Mp
noisemeister happycams cost at the time, not one which cost as much
for the body alone as an S2, D100, 10D or *ist, all of which (yes,
even the horrible Fuji) are far more polished products that do what
it says on the tin without battery dances, messing around with
selective colour or making sure that you don't expose for more than
a few secs.. Maybe they're selling SD10s for lowball prices in the
USA but in the UK, it's around 1700 US Bucks.

I'll recommend the SD9 til I'm blue in the face or Sigma run out of
them, whichever comes first , the foibles are acceptable at the
price and even "Quirky" and the results are top notch - a true
value camera but the SD10 should really be selling at 300D prices
NOT 10D level...

--
Please ignore the Typos, I'm the world's worst Typist

EOS-1D & Sigma SD9 - Sharper than a Saville Row Suit!

Click to expand...

Shoei said:

I did have a polarised on for that shot as well, but it shouldn't
have knocked off 4 stops

Click to expand...

Just Looking said:

Just Looking said:

Here are the first two "cityscape" shots. The first is as it came
out of the camera (no auto or custom SPP tweaks), the second (which
shows up the noise) was with a little "fill light" tweaking in SPP.

http://www.pbase.com/image/28520800
http://www.pbase.com/image/28520889

Click to expand...

When people talk about the Sigmas being noisy in poor light, I
think what they mean is that it gets noisy when the image is
underexposed, or when the shutter speed gets very slow, like more
than a few seconds. The SD10 does better than the SD9, but is
still not known for great low-light shooting.

Your sample above was shot at ISO 100, but "pushed" +1.4 stops in
SPP, and shadows brightened by +0.4 as well. So it's really more
like an ISO 400 shot, or two-stop underexposed for ISO 100. I
think that if you just set the shadow level back to zero, and let
the black areas be black, it will look a lot better.

Many settings can make noise show up more: Exposure push, shadow,
contrast, saturation, and especially Fill Light. If there's not
enough light in those dark areas, all you will see by pushing it is
noise.

For night shots, avoid Fill Light, or use it slightly negative to
clean up the black areas.

Just Looking said:

I was a little confused about this, and so I shot an F20 15sec
exposure of the front of my house. The results were absolutely
terrible (unusable). This is the result as it came from the Camera
(no auto or custom SPP tweaks).

http://www.pbase.com/image/28520980

Is this normal ?
Is anyone else seeing this
Is it something I'm doing wrong ?
have I picked up a lemon ?

Click to expand...

That does NOT look normal. Sometimes the AWB messes up on long
exposures; try changing it to a fixed balance such as incandescent
and see if that helps. But probably something worse has gone bad
with that shot. Does it consistently do that at very long
exposures?

j

Click to expand...

Just Looking said:

Shoei said:

I did have a polarised on for that shot as well, but it shouldn't
have knocked off 4 stops

Click to expand...

The polarizer could account for up to 2 stops. Also, if it's a
linear polarizer, it can at some orientations knock down the light
reflecting to the AE sensor, so cause the camera to overexpose.

Therefore, the exposure discrepenancy is perhaps not so huge as to
indicate a big problem. Do some more experiments, and see if it is
behaving more or less normally.

See my noise comments down-thread.

j

Click to expand...