Anyway. Mostly, I got what I expected i.e. nicely-exposed available-light shots:
Our Christmas Angel
(nice idiotic hat!)
(nice idiotic hat!)
But a few showed unexpected amounts of noise, probably because of underexposure resulting from some combo of minimum shutter speed, maximum aperture, etc. The in-camera JPGs actually did a bang-up job of reducing this, and it was only when looking at the RAW files that I realised quite how much noise there was:
When I started playing around with the TIF files in Noise Ninja, I realised that although I dislike "colour noise" (chroma) a lot, I actually quite like "luminance noise" -- it can be quite a pleasing graphic effect, reminiscent of film grain, and for certain subjects has an appropriate gritty detail (compare the hair in the image below with the JPG -- and, remember, these are 100% crops of 10 Megapixel images).
When I started playing around with the TIF files in Noise Ninja, I realised that although I dislike "colour noise" (chroma) a lot, I actually quite like "luminance noise" -- it can be quite a pleasing graphic effect, reminiscent of film grain, and for certain subjects has an appropriate gritty detail (compare the hair in the image below with the JPG -- and, remember, these are 100% crops of 10 Megapixel images).
Chroma noise (only) removed with Noise Ninja
Now, I'm not a huge fan of "alternative processes" as such, but sometimes an image just wants to go in a certain direction, and this portrait of a scruffy guy just cried out for the full-on monochrome nostalgia treatment. The grain and the silvery tones give it that Pictorialist Alvin Langdon Coburn / Julia Margaret Cameron look. Strange to think it originated in the highest-tech piece of kit that I own...
1 comment:
Noise really fits the subject here, a valuable discovery. In b&w - when the noise patterns are not too intrusive - a grained look may enhance the message greatly.
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