E-p2 low light noise

[Dunn]

I recently purchased an Olympus E-p2 and a Panny 20mm. I love the using the camera, but I'm having trouble with low light shots. It's mainly just in dark areas there is too much noise. It's like the camera is trying to pull out too much detail - detail that isn't even there sometimes. I would rather have deep solid blacks than noisy, grey areas.

Maybe I just haven't learned the camera yet. Can anyone tell me how to get the low light shots that I want?

Two example photos: Both shot at 1/80sec, f1.8, and ISO 640. I had the camera set to black and white, by the way. The non-dark areas of the photo look great to me: sharp and smooth

And even the shot of the reflection, the girl's hair in the mirror looks fine, but the girl on the right is all noisy.

In the other photo notice the girl's black dress.

I feel the ISO isn't even that high. I've seen some photos other people have taken at 1600 that look better.
What's up with that?

 

[gavinlg]

You shooting as jpeg straight out of the camera? You need to pull the dark/blacks down in post processing. You can do it with JPEG files, or if you want a little more lattutide you can also do it with RAW files. Photoshop or Lightroom can do this in a number of ways.

 

[gavinlg]

10 seconds each in photoshop:

Just use the 'curves' adjustment, clip the blacks against the histogram slightly, then pull down the darks, and adjust the mids back up to a linear curve into the highs to preserve highlight detail. Same can be done in lightroom.

Hope this helps! The e-p1 is a great camera.

 

[Dunn]

Those are jpegs right out of the camera. I hadn't even tried to edit them. I played with the levels a little. I did get them looking better, but not perfect. Do you suggest a better way then just using levels? I'm not the best post processor.

I guess I'm just used to the blacks in film and kind of freak when I saw that noise. Ha.

 

[gavinlg]

Do you have photoshop or lightroom? What program are you using to process?

 

[Dunn]

Awesome.

That actually did help, a lot. Thanks so much, bro.

I hate post-process. Ha.

I have both. But I usually use photoshop. I just got lightroom for raw files, but I have hardly used it so I'm not comfortable with it yet.

 

[dreilly]

Try to increase the contrast in the B&W setting in the camera. That might save you some post-processing bother.

 

[Dunn]

Try to increase the contrast in the B&W setting in the camera. That might save you some post-processing bother.

I'll try that. I was wondering if any of the in-camera settings would help.

Maybe tone down sharpness too?

 

[gavinlg]

Try to increase the contrast in the B&W setting in the camera. That might save you some post-processing bother.

But also note that when you increase contrast in-camera, you're increasing contrast in both dark and light tones, meaning you'll get more blown highlights. Doing it in PP means you can just make the darks darker and keep information in the highlights.

I've found the best way to use digital photography is to apply film theory to it. So your file out of the camera is like your negative. You want it to keep as much information as possible about the scene, especially highlight detail. The Post Processing part is like film printing. You dodge/burn to bump up or draw back contrast. You can even come up with a default setting of contrast curves etc and just apply it to every file you PP, making it instant, which is pretty handy.

Hope I'm not overcomplicating things!

 

[dreilly]

In my film days I shot a lot of side. So what you got was what you got. Never bothered me because I always thoughts slides provided the most realistic, glowing photo experience. So it's funny but I have a tendency to think of digital like slide film. Get it right in camera, little post processing. I've found that some camera systems do jpegs much better than others. Olympus is the best I've ever seen. It probably also means I tweak exposure comp quite a bit as well, however. Funny, different film experiences lead to different digital approaches.

Anyway, you might be right about the blown highlights, though the exposure calculations might change if they're biased against blown highlights...anyway it's worth a try for a few test images to see if it will be too much or just right. It might work and save some PP.

 

[mh2000]

If you hate PP-ing, I would suggest you focus on using LL. Great for fast organization and PP. I thought I was going to hate it, but now try to use PS as little as possible. (You can do a lot in LL too!)

Awesome.

That actually did help, a lot. Thanks so much, bro.

I hate post-process. Ha.

I have both. But I usually use photoshop. I just got lightroom for raw files, but I have hardly used it so I'm not comfortable with it yet.

 

[dreilly]

Lightroom is the unsung hero of digital photography. It's saved me untold hours and frustration in PP and is the single best photo purchase I ever made. Once you do get comfy with it, you shudder every time you back to PS.

 

[willie_901]

You want excellent an excellent signal-to-noise ratio at ISO 640 and you also hate post-processing.

The only solution to your problem is to buy a camera with a larger sensor. The physics of Bayer sensors predicts small sensors will never achieve the signal-to-noise ratio of a larger sensor (all other things being equal such as the efficiency of heat dissipation from the sensor, and the sensor electronics and generation).

And this is why I sold my m 4/3 camera.

 

[ktran]

by default, the camera's set to "auto gradation," which tries to compress dynamic range by holding the highlights and boosting the shadows. this avoids clipped highlights, but also increases shadow noise, especially if you're trying for the high-contrast black and white look, since auto-gradation will essentially try to reduce contrast by bringing out more shadow detail.

I set the gradation to "normal," and have much less problems with shadow noise. Then I also bump the contrast up to max in-camera for shooting black and white.

Hope this helps.

 

[shadowfox]

You want excellent an excellent signal-to-noise ratio at ISO 640 and you also hate post-processing.

The only solution to your problem is to buy a camera with a larger sensor. The physics of Bayer sensors predicts small sensors will never achieve the signal-to-noise ratio of a larger sensor (all other things being equal such as the efficiency of heat dissipation from the sensor, and the sensor electronics and generation).

And this is why I sold my m 4/3 camera.

Which could quickly turn into a mentality to fix everything by buying another set of cameras or gear. 🙂

Honestly, the noise doesn't look bad at all in the original photos.

But I second the recommendation to learn to use LR effectively, it's worth the effort. I am of course talking about LR3. If you're still using LR2, upgrade, it's worth the price.

 

[jsrockit]

What's wrong with a little noise?