G1 Processing tips for ISO 800?

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gdi

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I am not getting very good results with 800. I normally use no NR, and little sharping with the M8. But I don't think I can get away with no sharpening with the G1 - so noise becomes a problem.

I am using LR2.0, any tips?

thx
 
I think you may be confusing artifacts cause by over sharpening with chroma and color noise.

When an image is over sharpened the result may look like noise, but over sharpening creates artifacts–not noise. Noise is defined as random uncertainties in the data. Noise is an intrinsic part of the data. By contrast, sharpening artifacts are not random, nor are they uncertainties, they are distortions of the data. Noise is unavoidable. Sharpening artifacts are avoidable. Noise can not be reduced... it can only be filtered (or averaged with the data). Noise filtering always degrades image quality. However the degree of IQ reduction is often less troubling than the noise, so noise filtering is a useful practical compromise.

All digital images benefit from an appropriate level of sharpening at some point in the post-processing work flow. Are you shooting RAW or jpg with either camera? Different vendors use different amounts of noise reduction and perhaps the G1 menu is set to a noise reduction level that is not optimal for ISO 800. This may be the case for in-camera sharpening as well.

While I don't own either camera, the published reviews on image quality indicate the M8 has better performance at ISO 800. This is expected as the M8 has a much larger sensor.

With LR 2's Develop Module you adjust capture sharpening which only eliminates unavoidable artifacts created by the digitization of analog information. In general, less is more when it comes to capture sharpening. In the Export and Print modules, LR lets you select different level of output sharpening.

A Google search on LR 2 tutorials will reveal some great tips on how to best use capture sharpening and noise filtering.

I hope this helps.
 
Have you got any sample images? I shot with the G1 today at the chinese new year parade, and I used ISO 800. Most of my stuff was outdoors late afternoon to dust in open shadows.


/
 
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willie_901 said:
I think you may be confusing artifacts cause by over sharpening with chroma and color noise.

When an image is over sharpened the result may look like noise, but over sharpening creates artifacts–not noise. Noise is defined as random uncertainties in the data. Noise is an intrinsic part of the data. By contrast, sharpening artifacts are not random, nor are they uncertainties, they are distortions of the data. Noise is unavoidable. Sharpening artifacts are avoidable. Noise can not be reduced... it can only be filtered (or averaged with the data). Noise filtering always degrades image quality. However the degree of IQ reduction is often less troubling than the noise, so noise filtering is a useful practical compromise.

All digital images benefit from an appropriate level of sharpening at some point in the post-processing work flow. Are you shooting RAW or jpg with either camera? Different vendors use different amounts of noise reduction and perhaps the G1 menu is set to a noise reduction level that is not optimal for ISO 800. This may be the case for in-camera sharpening as well.

While I don't own either camera, the published reviews on image quality indicate the M8 has better performance at ISO 800. This is expected as the M8 has a much larger sensor.

With LR 2's Develop Module you adjust capture sharpening which only eliminates unavoidable artifacts created by the digitization of analog information. In general, less is more when it comes to capture sharpening. In the Export and Print modules, LR lets you select different level of output sharpening.

A Google search on LR 2 tutorials will reveal some great tips on how to best use capture sharpening and noise filtering.

I hope this helps.
Click to expand...


Thanks, bur I am not over sharpening - I am looking for tips on dealing with the high noise. For example my workflow for the M8 at high ISO is no sharpening or NR. A good M8 file doesn't need sharpening at all at High ISOs.
 
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RayPA said:
Have you got any sample images? I shot with the G1 today at the chinese new year parade, and I used ISO 800. Most of my stuff was outdoors late afternoon to dust in open shadows.
G1 at parade set

/
Click to expand...

I should have been more clear - I am trying to develop a decent work flow for printing low light shots. The results I am getting are good for web display, but prints would probably be limited due to the noise. I took some 1000 shots in daylight and they look pretty good. low light with lots of shadows seem to suffer - though my first adjustment should be increasing the exposure.


Here is a link to a large (but resized) cropped 1000 shot that looks ok...
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3389/3263092474_1641f2157f_b.jpg

Thanks.
 
I think you need to try Neat Image. It does wonders for those noisy images and for me the noise reduction it does is better then what light room can do. Also noise does not show up as a problem in my old 20D shots printed to 30x20 at iso 3200 but we might have a different scale of what acceptable is.
 
Avotius said:
I think you need to try Neat Image. It does wonders for those noisy images and for me the noise reduction it does is better then what light room can do. Also noise does not show up as a problem in my old 20D shots printed to 30x20 at iso 3200 but we might have a different scale of what acceptable is.
Click to expand...

I have neat image, but I usually consider it a last resort.
 
gdi said:
A good M8 file doesn't need sharpening at all at High ISOs.
Click to expand...

You may prefer not to apply sharpening, which is fine. The M8 does not have an anti-aliasing filter, so in principle M8 images may require less sharpening (or different sharpening methods than images from cameras with anti-aliaing filters. But all digital images (except those with essentially no detail whatsoever) benefit from sharpening.

From: http://www.bythom.com/sharpening.htm

"Why Is Sharpening Necessary?

The nasty truth underlying all digital recording techniques is that they turn analog signals into discrete samples of the original. CD players, for example, sample sounds at 44 kilohertz (i.e., 44 thousand times a second) and record each sample using 16 bits of data. The frequency of digital sampling and the amount of data sampled determine how well the analog original can be reproduced. The coarser the sampling, the less the digital recording is like the original.

State of the art consumer digital cameras have a sampling frequency of 4500 by 3000 pixels (e.g., Kodak Pro 14n), with the amount of data recorded being 12 bits for each of the red, green, and blue colors. These numbers are actually relatively crude compared to the analog reality, where detail and color variations are nearly infinite. The real world sports an infinite number of shades of blue in the sky and an endless amount of detail, but your digital camera only captures between 1000 and 4500 pixels of horizontal detail in perhaps thousands of shades of possible blues. While that�s pretty darn good, it does cause two resolution-oriented problems:

1. Detail smaller than the pixel size is usually lost.
2. Where transitions between details occur within the area of a single pixel, the transition usually results in a digital value that is neither of the original values.

This second problem is what makes details in your photographs look fuzzy. The classic example is that of a diagonal transition line that transects a pixel. The pixel can either be white, black, or some in between value. If the camera were to render the pixel as entirely white or black, then you�d see an artifact known as the stairstep, so named because a diagonal line gets rendered as a series of pixel blocks that resemble a set of two-dimensional stairs. The alternative is to record the pixel as an "in-between" gray (which still produces a bit of a stairstep effect, but isn't quite as obvious). Neither case is correct, and both tend to reduce apparent sharpness.

All digital cameras use in-camera interpolation to detect edge transitions, and use some form of digital sampling to create in-between values for those diagonal lines. The result? Instead of a precise transition from one pixel value to another, diagonal details (and sometimes small horizontal and vertical details) are rendered as a more gradual transition from one color to another. Our brains have been programmed to see blurry or soft edges as being out-of-focus, thus unmodified digital photographs always tend to look just a tad soft. That's even true of higher resolution cameras and scanners' film images I've had scanned on 4000 dpi drum scanners still look a little soft in the detail areas."

and

From: http://www.creativepro.com/article/...ow-about-sharpening-photoshop-were-afraid-ask

This was written by Bruce Frazier who wrote: before his untimely death.

"It's a sad but undeniable fact of life: Whether you scan, shoot, or capture, the process of digitizing images introduces softness, and to get great-looking results, you'll need to sharpen the great majority of digital images."

"The softness introduced during digitizing results from the very nature of the digitizing process. To represent images digitally, we must transform them from continuous gradations of tone and color to points on a regular sampling grid. Detail that's finer than the sampling frequency gets "averaged" into the pixels, softening the overall appearance. ... As a result, just about every digital image requires sharpening, no matter what its source, to counteract the softness introduced both in the capture and output processes."
 
willie_901 said:
You may prefer not to apply sharpening, which is fine. The M8 does not have an anti-aliasing filter, so in principle M8 images may require less sharpening (or different sharpening methods than images from cameras with anti-aliaing filters. But all digital images (except those with essentially no detail whatsoever) benefit from sharpening.

From: http://www.bythom.com/sharpening.htm

"Why Is Sharpening Necessary?

The nasty truth underlying all digital recording techniques is that they turn analog signals into discrete samples of the original. CD players, for example, sample sounds at 44 kilohertz (i.e., 44 thousand times a second) and record each sample using 16 bits of data. The frequency of digital sampling and the amount of data sampled determine how well the analog original can be reproduced. The coarser the sampling, the less the digital recording is like the original.

State of the art consumer digital cameras have a sampling frequency of 4500 by 3000 pixels (e.g., Kodak Pro 14n), with the amount of data recorded being 12 bits for each of the red, green, and blue colors. These numbers are actually relatively crude compared to the analog reality, where detail and color variations are nearly infinite. The real world sports an infinite number of shades of blue in the sky and an endless amount of detail, but your digital camera only captures between 1000 and 4500 pixels of horizontal detail in perhaps thousands of shades of possible blues. While that�s pretty darn good, it does cause two resolution-oriented problems:

1. Detail smaller than the pixel size is usually lost.
2. Where transitions between details occur within the area of a single pixel, the transition usually results in a digital value that is neither of the original values.

This second problem is what makes details in your photographs look fuzzy. The classic example is that of a diagonal transition line that transects a pixel. The pixel can either be white, black, or some in between value. If the camera were to render the pixel as entirely white or black, then you�d see an artifact known as the stairstep, so named because a diagonal line gets rendered as a series of pixel blocks that resemble a set of two-dimensional stairs. The alternative is to record the pixel as an "in-between" gray (which still produces a bit of a stairstep effect, but isn't quite as obvious). Neither case is correct, and both tend to reduce apparent sharpness.

All digital cameras use in-camera interpolation to detect edge transitions, and use some form of digital sampling to create in-between values for those diagonal lines. The result? Instead of a precise transition from one pixel value to another, diagonal details (and sometimes small horizontal and vertical details) are rendered as a more gradual transition from one color to another. Our brains have been programmed to see blurry or soft edges as being out-of-focus, thus unmodified digital photographs always tend to look just a tad soft. That's even true of higher resolution cameras and scanners' film images I've had scanned on 4000 dpi drum scanners still look a little soft in the detail areas."

and

From: http://www.creativepro.com/article/...ow-about-sharpening-photoshop-were-afraid-ask

This was written by Bruce Frazier who wrote: before his untimely death.

"It's a sad but undeniable fact of life: Whether you scan, shoot, or capture, the process of digitizing images introduces softness, and to get great-looking results, you'll need to sharpen the great majority of digital images."

"The softness introduced during digitizing results from the very nature of the digitizing process. To represent images digitally, we must transform them from continuous gradations of tone and color to points on a regular sampling grid. Detail that's finer than the sampling frequency gets "averaged" into the pixels, softening the overall appearance. ... As a result, just about every digital image requires sharpening, no matter what its source, to counteract the softness introduced both in the capture and output processes."
Click to expand...

Thanks Professor! :D

But I think if you used the M8 at HIGH ISOs you would know what I am talking about. I am not alone in finding that sharpening a M8 file at times will accentuate the noise and degrade the image.

So, I do disagree that all digital images benefit from sharpening - even though contrary to the conventional wisdom you copied.

I am sure this is not the case with the G1 - thus my looking for advice of those more experienced with the camera.

Thanks again
 
I use Noise Ninja to clean up all of my noisy images. I run them through NN first, before doing any other post-processing steps. It is true that noisy, high ISO digital images usually respond badly to sharpening. Sometimes NN will reduce the noise enough so they can be sharpened. Sometimes not.

/T
 
I use Neat Image to remove noise, especially chroma noise all the time from my ISO 1600 Ricoh GRD shots that I intend to print. I find it works really really well if you have well calibrated profiles and the loss of detail is inconsequential.
 
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