750D raw noise

Hello there. 
I was, for the biggest part of my adult life, a point and shoot guy. My last camera was a Sony Powershot 500 something something. But recently i decided to go into the DSLR world. 
I bought a 750D and a couple of lenses to go with it. After a few days shooting on jpg i decided to change it to raw. 
When i first imported my raw files into lightroom i was amazed with the quantity of noise at low ISO speeds... 
This images were not edited on any way, they were just cropped. It was on a mall with fairly good light.

In the last image you can see lots of little dots on her skin. 
I know that when the camera converts to JPG it does some noise reduction, but wasn't aware that it was that aggressive!
So, my question is... Is this kind of level normal? I have no guide to compare with since i have never shot on raw. 
Thank you!

hello,

what you are seeing is largely un processed and uncompressed, the RAW files need post processing to be useful.

some software does a better job of a preview image than others, but the raw files themselves are not useful for anything. aside from being archival.

i might suggest shooting RAW+JPEG, this really helped me get to know my PP software and reveal some shortcomings of the in-camera jpeg processing.

the cameras are very smart, and do an OK job in a lot of situations, but PP software can really help reveal things about your shots that can bring out things the camera engine might miss.

i have attached a couple of my processed shots, the ant at the bottom is an out of the camera Jpeg, and the same images is a processed RAW file, saved as Jpeg.

while the Ant JPEG is fine and pretty accurate, punching up the local tones brings a little drama in my opinion.

your camera sensor essentially "sees" everything and grabs it, the in camera Jpeg process makes assumptions that my or may not be what you were going for

this is an example with only using "smart photo fix" in PSP

Hello and congrats on your new camera purchase. To me everything looks good. You got less than ideal results because it's how camera works and how default processing software works.

1: Keep in mind, that with new 24 Mpx camera, looking at 1:1 at your image on the LCD, you're looking at greatly magnified, maybe more than 1m wide image. That's not how images are viewed. Not fair, and very revealing for any camera. Proceed to downsize for viewable sizes, or at least maximum 4k....

2:Exposure.

It's obvious one cannot always handle it towards ones noise performance goals, but the more you expose, the less noise will be visible. So if you can expose more (wider aperture or longer exposure time), do it. There is compromise to that. with more exposure, you risk blowing the light/more lit areas, which will get overexposed. That's bad too. one needs to think about decisions...

3:Processing

Especially in Lightroom, default processing is not good for final output. There is absolutely no luminance denoise applied, and about everything from the noise is sharpened.

Using extreme settings to actually see, look at what detail and masking settings of the sharpening (set 100 for testing) do to the background noise (Press alt key while you set masking to really see the magic).

Also look at what detail and contrast of the denoise settings can do.

All this can give or take you several stops of apparent noise performance.

shk12 wrote:

i have attached a couple of my processed shots, the ant at the bottom is an out of the camera Jpeg, and the same images is a processed RAW file, saved as Jpeg.

while the Ant JPEG is fine and pretty accurate, punching up the local tones brings a little drama in my opinion.

I wouldn't want to oversell the difference. Here's the jpeg, very lightly processed.

Curve fixed; sharpened just for the heck of it; about 10 seconds of work; if you want it better, do a careful job.

I would also try looking at the same file in Canon's software - DPP. I've found that Adobe's algorithms aren't as kind to Canon sensors as they are to the Sony sensors found in most other cameras. They aren't "horrible", but they don't do as well as Canon's native processing.

Woody W. wrote:

I would also try looking at the same file in Canon's software - DPP. I've found that Adobe's algorithms aren't as kind to Canon sensors as they are to the Sony sensors found in most other cameras. They aren't "horrible", but they don't do as well as Canon's native processing.

On that I cannot agree. It's rather default processing difference And sharpening difference. Canon does rather heavy handed large radius sharpening, which doesn't highlight every spec of the noise, but rathar makes less visible larger blotches, which in change translates into poorer detail.

yes