Noisy Images

[JimNotJon]

I thought of this to be the best place of any to ask my question.

I have a Fuji Finepix S9600 camera which up until recently I have been pleased with. But latley I have been getting shots which result is excessive noise, and its usualy more in the evening/night shots than during the day.

My Lense is clean and so are any filters I use. I was told that it may be the UV (saftey) filter I use on the front, so I removed it and pictures come across the same.

Its very dissheartening seeing this, especially after a good few hours out taking pictures.

During the evening/night shots, I generally have my tripod with me anyway, and always use my lowest ISO setting, which for me is 80.

I really am getting quite annoyed with the whole scenario now.

I took some sample shots which I croped 100% for you to view, although theyre not brillaint to see my problem. I have added a night shot of a friends golf, which you can clearley see the noise, this was taken in RAW mode! ( I do seem to get more noise in that mode for some reason !? ).

ISO 100



ISO 100 RAW



ISO 400



ISO 400 RAW



ISO 1600



ISO 1600 RAW



My Friends Golf (ISO 80, RAW, 12 Second Exposure (Can't remember Aperture).






Regards, Jim

[_dobbo_]

Jim, according to the exif data the Golf image is shot at ISO400 not at ISO80.

The reason you see more noise in the RAW image is that the jpeg clearly has some noise reduction applied, hence it's very soft and lacks a lot of detail. You might get on better with noise removal software like neat image, rather than letting the camera do it.

High ISO tends to mean high noise - but your golf image does look a bit poor for something shot at ISO400. You seem to imply that the noise issue gets worse if you use the camera a lot - is this correct?

[RobDickinson]

Theres a few things goin gon ther ebut mostly understand that a long exposuer (relativly) low ISO shot is going to have more 'dark noise', or the signal-noise ratio is screwed.

Basicaly in dark/long exposures theres so little light falling on the sensor pixels the noise(inherent from manufatur of the photosites/aplifiers etc) becomes far more of the signal than at short shutter speeds. Which is why a lot of cameras have a long exposure noise compensation setting, to try negate this issue.

[JimNotJon]

Ah right I see, that explains it a bit more. Im still very new to it, and still sometimes not able to spot obvious mistakes. It was very very dark shooting that golf, alot darker than the image suggests, and I did take it in ISO 80, but I believe I saved it in photoshops RAW converter and mistakenley changed a setting to ISO 400.


I will be patient and take more images and see what results I get.


Thanks guys.

[VxDuncan]

Yup, sounds like your camera is using noise cancellation on the jpegs. You should get a better result shooting RAW and getting rid of the noise yourself as in-camera noise reduction is quite simple to fit the hardware.

If you've noticed an increase in noise recently it's probably because it's summer and the electronics are hotter! (makes quite a bit of difference)