Using High ISO
Here’s the problem - I’m out in my garden early in the morning with my new D200 with 70-300mm zoom attached. At the back of the garden just in front of the back fence, in partial shade, is a Yucca with the soft morning light just brushing it. I could have run indoors to fetch my tripod - even early morning light doesn’t change that quickly - but what if I wasn’t at home and had no tripod with me? So I decided that I would simply bump the ISO setting up to a point where I could comfortably hand hold the zoom (at it’s longest setting - effectively a 450mm lens, albeit a lightweight one). To be on the safe side and taking into account my advanced years I figured that 1/500th at my chosen aperture of f8 would be fine. That entailed a setting of 640ISO and I took the shot.
Importing the shot into Aperture, the initial editing was very quick and easy, just a tweak of the white and black points, a lift in the mid tones and very small adjustments to the quarter tones. Now the D200 has a very good high ISO performance, certainly better than my old D70, but quite clearly there was noise starting slightly in the mid tones and increasing beyond there downwards through the darker tones.
Exporting the file to Photoshop I could have fairly painlessly cleaned the noise up in Noise Ninja but I’ve never much liked doing that, despite the fact that Noise Ninja really does a very good job of it. Even at low ISO settings where there is no noise to speak of I’ve never been fond of that smooth grainless “digital” look to out of focus areas. To me it always tends to look “unreal”, or should I say “unphotographic” as if the eye needs some texture or “tooth” to latch onto. Well, maybe that’s just me, but I decided to take the file into Alien Skin’s Exposure plug in and, after tweaking the color balance with a Polachrome setting I had saved, to make the image a little “cooler” I played around with the grain settings until I attained the size, amount and tonal spread that just blended with the noise already present in the image and made it look like slight grain instead of just dark tone noise. Here you have to be quite careful as if the noise is already harsh in the image and you then try to add an over grainy effect to attempt to cover it up the grain interacts with the noise in some rather strange ways and you end up with a totally unreal looking mess. Gently does it is best but it really can work well.
As I’ve said I do somewhat miss the look of grain, even if it’s ultra fine Kodachrome grain, in digital so I actually add very slight grain to most of my digital color images. I just prefer the look!
Oh yes - and here’s the final image, although please not that the grain is not really apparent in the small jpeg here but certainly is, though subtle, in the full size image.
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I agree completely about grain. I sometimes use Noise Ninja to strip out the high-ISO noise and then use an action to add a more film-like grain to the smoothed result. The Exposure plugin is amazing; I downloaded a trial version a while ago and really enjoyed it. Unfortunately I have no professional need for it right now, so it’ll have to wait until I can make up a plausible excuse to buy it.
In the meantime I’ve been making do with some free actions and, channel-mixer presets, and the “Match Color” feature with some scanned film as the source image.
Digital cameras do not produce ‘grain’. They produce ‘noise’. There is a huge difference. And while the Nikon D200 is a great camera, it still is not a superior low-light performer. There are other dSLR products on the market place that slam the D200 in low-light conditions.
I agree with you about grain and noise. Unlike Johnny Blood, who shoots with a Canon 5D, known for it’s sleek and smooth images, I have learnt to love image ‘noise’. Like you, I like to add noise to my images, in the form of digitally added grain. Like Bryan C, I use Alien Skin Exposure on many of my images, but more recently, have discovered DxO FilmPack. Filmpack runs a little faster than Exposure, and whilst it has a narrower choice of films, it offers much control over grain. This, combined with the speed of use, has encouraged me to buy the software, on expiry of my 21 day trial. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I think you will find it to be worth a look, and worth a trial. This, along with Exposure, makes for a very complete toolbox for flim-like effects.
As for Johnny…grain was the noise of the film era, and great artists of photography learnt to love it, use it, and even chose and processed their films in order to enhance it. I used to process fast b&w film in lith developer, to achieve stunningly grainy and contrasty effects in my prints. Personally, whilst there will always be a market [especially in the magazine publishing industry] for smooth images [and, Johnny, a Hasselblad and a good film scanner will still blow away the 5D, and many more too], I can see a growing market for images with grain, and many of them are beginning to be published in trendy magazines, the risk takers that will always publish the cross-processed, the grainy, and the more adventurous images.
Hurray for grain, hurray for adventure!
Add me into those that definitely enjoy the look of grain at times - although some digital noise really does look unpleasant - so I will also usually clean it up a la Noise Ninja, and then, for pictures that I deem appropriate to have the “grain” look - I will add it after smoothing away the original mess, if there is one. Wicked shot, by the way, and I think I can just make out the subtleness of the grain you added on-screen.
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Nikon may have sorted out this high ISO quality issue with the D300 and D3 that they plan to release in November. I shot with a D2Hs and although the noise is noticeable at higher settings, i haven’t found it ruins any images. Quite frankly i think that grain ( or noise! ) is a price you pay for getting an image in low light. I can think of many images where the grain/noise ADDS to the image. If the image noise isn’t acceptable -put the camera away. I still shoot on film FOR the grain it provides so maybe i’m slightly biased.