The Nikon Autofocus System by Mike Hagen

Author:Mike Hagen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Rocky Nook
Published: 2015-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

How ISO Noise and Long Exposure Noise Impact Sharpness

As cool as it is to use auto ISO to help with shutter speeds, you don’t get something for nothing. Higher ISOs reduce image quality due to noise. As a photographer, you always balance sharpness loss from motion blur with quality loss from higher ISOs. There isn’t an easy answer to this dilemma. You can use a sharp photo with noise, but you can’t use a blurry photo without noise, so use as a high an ISO value as needed to freeze motion blur.

There are two types of noise in digital photography: color noise (chroma) and luminance noise. Color noise is generally considered bad, and luminance noise is considered artistic. Color noise manifests as brown and orange splotches in the darker areas of a photograph. Luminance noise is somewhat analogous to grain in film. A little bit of luminance noise isn’t a bad thing, and I don’t generally worry too much about it in my images.

Two ways to deal with noise are in-camera or during post-processing. Dealing with noise in-camera requires that you turn on High ISO NR (noise reduction) in the shooting menu (figure 2-58). The camera then implements a noise reduction algorithm at high ISO values. The threshold for high noise depends on which camera you are using. For example, the Nikon D300 starts kicking in noise reduction after ISO 800, whereas other cameras initiate noise reduction at different ISO values.

There are generally four options:

High: I find this setting to be overkill in most situations because it causes skin to look too smooth.

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