LFingar wrote:
Now that Covid is not so prevalent I have been able to return to shooting basketball games at the local college. I have noticed that IQ has dropped slightly. The photos aren't bad, by my standards anyway, but when brought up to 100% they have a distinct blurriness that hadn't occurred previously. Aside from a different camera, an R5 instead of an R, I have been experimenting with different lenses. Still, with my usual lens, an RF 85mm F/1.2 L, and usual settings the results have been distinctly different then before. The one big difference has been the use of the High setting for noise reduction. I selected that at the first game when I was using an f/4 lens because of the higher ISO required and never set it back. I shoot the games in JPEG, BTW. I give all the photos to the athletic dept, after deleting a large (huge) percentage of them, so JPEG works fine. I became suspicious of the High setting so when my nephew, a former pro photographer stopped in yesterday to show me his latest $10,000 Nikon lens I mentioned it to him. He laughed and said "Blurs it, doesn't it?". So there you have it. I wasn't aware of that aspect of noise reduction. Has anyone else run into this issue?
https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-759347-1.htmlNow that Covid is not so prevalent I have been abl... (
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One of the things about photography that is most attractive to me is its versatility...it is useful as a recorder of events, a capturer of memories, a creator of visuals for training, a creator of fine art, a documenter of inspections (of property, for instance), a recorder of surveillance activity, and a vehicle for being able to see the otherwise unseen. Like many folks, I have used it for many of these functions, sometimes for more than one at the same time. Photography has many features, functions, and aspects. Some are more useful than others for its various uses. Some are irrelevant to some of them.
Serious, directed photography was initially a peripheral activity for me. Approaching 60 years ago I was working on a science fair project, and I needed to document and display the physical construction of the internals of various transistors and other semiconductor devices. So starting from and building on my experience photographically recording our family vacations, I learned about extension tubes and lighting and color correction filters to do just that. The discovery that I could move beyond ordinary snapshots then moved me into photography with very limited available light and then photography of things that were otherwise too dark to see in ordinary circumstances.
My point here is that it is interesting that we as photographers use capabilities of our cameras that were put there for one purpose to accomplish completely different purposes. One example of that is the increasingly high ISO capabilities built into our cameras. If you investigate, you will come to realize that high sensitivity capability is put there primarily for the benefit of one group of camera users (and reliable paying customers)...those doing photographic surveillance. Those are the folks who can reliably and beneficially make use of the ability to operate at ISOs of 12,00 or 25,000 or even higher to do things they can't accomplish any other way, and will reliably pay money in large numbers for the capability. They usually don't care about loss of dynamic range at those levels, nor loss of color rendition, nor the presence of some noise in the images. They can get the shot that they could not get before, and they can do it with less obtrusive lenses that call attention to their activity.
As to High ISO Noise Reduction...I don't know about your camera, but my cameras all provide an option to use it at less than full throttle. I had a favorite aunt who had several life mottos. One of my favorites was, "All things in moderation, even excess." I use noise in-camera noise reduction frequently. But almost never with the gas pedal pressed all the way to the floor. Less usually works better and provides what is needed. After all, do you always slam the sliders all the way to the right when you do post processing? Just because it doesn't work well when turned all the way up doesn't have to mean that it is useless.
Second...remember that noise reduction is tasked with removing noise from your image. It has to remove what was replaced with something. Otherwise it leaves a blank pixel behind. There are several ways to choose what to put in the hole. If all the surrounding pixels are the same (or about the same), it wil usuallu just replace the hole with the value of those pixels. If they are different, then the software has to make a choice. It has to "make something up." That's when the trouble starts. Even "good" software isn't going to always get it right.
Finally...as I have worked with folks using high ISOs, I have found that more than probably 90% of the time, despite using the high ISOs, they are still underexposing their images. Don't do that. Noise happens when a system thinks it has to fill in a gap that is empty. Make sure that your shots are fully exposed.
This is probably a lot more than you were asking for, but maybe it will give you some food for thought moving forward.