ISO and noise

[sedwards]

ive been reading a lot of reveiws of different cameras lately and with the recent talk of the 7DII , i decided to take a few test shots with my 70D.
i asked mr squirel to model for me and he said sue lol. i found that if you can fill the frame and dont need to crop , it works fine all the way up to 12800 ISO . of course there is noise in the background but its not real bad. i have read where you can aply a gausian blur to the background to mask some of the noise but havent figured that part out yet lol.

ISO 3200
ISO 3200 by sedwards679, on Flickr
ISO 6400
ISO 6400 by sedwards679, on Flickr
ISO 12800
ISO 12800 by sedwards679, on Flickr

[M_Six]

Pretty clean for that ISO. No complaints there. For backgrounds I sometime duplicate the image and then apply a Surface Blur with Radius in the single digits and Threshold a bit lower. Like 8 and 5 or 5 and 3. Then I add a mask and use it to bring the subject back in sharp, leaving the background blurred just the tiniest bit to hide the noise.

[DavidEccleston]

I'm curious how people's noise tolerance will change as display's are finally getting out of the 1080p rut. Apple just released a 5K (5120x2880) 27" iMac. At that res, my 1Ds2 can't actually fill the screen. The 7D and 1DX can only crop 64 pixels off the edge... The 5D3 gets a few hundred pixels cropping range... basically, you'll be pixel peeping un-cropped images when viewing your desktop wallpaper... you'll see the noise, but the pixels will be 4x smaller, so the noise appear super fine grained.

Off topic, but, I also think it's a (minor) business opportunity here. I'm thinking Jonathan and Joel could make some money selling desktop wallpapers for new 5K iMac owners. There won't be much else available, and their shots are fantastic. Jonathan covers all sorts of subjects from mountainous landscapes, to polar bear cubs... something for everyone.

[DavidEccleston]

Stuart, what noise processing was done to these images? If they are shot JPG, what level of noise reduction/sharpness are selected in camera? (I can't ask about specific settings, as I don't know what the 70D's options are). Your ISO12800 shot, even viewed full size, looks like it's all luma noise, not chroma noise... usually at high ISOs the chroma noise is big, blotchy, and very ugly. These are nice! That ISO12800 shot's lack of chroma blotches, even in the shadows, has done more to sell me on a 7D2 upgrade than anything Canon has shown.

[sedwards]

i had pused the slide to 8 for luminance in lightroom. i suck at cleaning up noise lol. here are the same 3 pics unedited . i did lower the exposure 0.3 on the 12800 one to try and make the histograms look the same for all 3 but no other changes made. shot as raw. high iso noise reduction is turned off in camera.
3200 unedited by sedwards679, on Flickr
6400 unedited by sedwards679, on Flickr
12800 unedited by sedwards679, on Flickr

[Busted Knuckles]

12800 - I am not complaining. Perhaps a very high contrast rock star on stage pic might have noise issues, but this type of subject matter/content at the resolutions being displayed.....

[jamsus]

If it is necessary, i'm not scared to boost out ISO - mainly to reduce shutter speed. I'm not going to print 200x300 stamps, so it's okay for me.

If people lives pixel-peepeing each picture... they will gonna have bad days, i suppose ^_^

[Kayaker72]

I'm curious how people's noise tolerance will change as display's are finally getting out of the 1080p rut. Apple just released a 5K (5120x2880) 27" iMac. At that res, my 1Ds2 can't actually fill the screen. The 7D and 1DX can only crop 64 pixels off the edge... The 5D3 gets a few hundred pixels cropping range... basically, you'll be pixel peeping un-cropped images when viewing your desktop wallpaper... you'll see the noise, but the pixels will be 4x smaller, so the noise appear super fine grained.

Off topic, but, I also think it's a (minor) business opportunity here. I'm thinking Jonathan and Joel could make some money selling desktop wallpapers for new 5K iMac owners. There won't be much else available, and their shots are fantastic. Jonathan covers all sorts of subjects from mountainous landscapes, to polar bear cubs... something for everyone.

Huh...that is really interesting and something I hadn't thought about, but what you see at "100%" is relative to the monitor used. Seems obvious now, but 1080 has been a standard for awhile. Even in Arthur Morris's thread on the 7DII he had several references to "for those used to viewing at 100%" and "for those used to viewing at 200%" but those statements only mean something if people have the same resolution in their monitors.

You may be right. But it also has the potential to change many things. If I understand it correctly, websites are set up to not fill a screen but provide x pixels. So, unless there is a feature to fit a webpage to a higher res screen, the whole webpage will be pretty small, if viewed at 100%. For example, I believe the horizontal limit in this forum is 1,000 pixels. For some people, that will be getting to be pretty small.

[Kayaker72]

Nice examples Stuart. Even viewing the full sized images you have on Flickr, those are much better than I would have thought and certainly compress to a web display nicely. An interesting point since most of my final output is 1,000 x 1,000 pixels for a web display either Flickr, here or FB. The primary issues would be lost detail if you want to crop or when printing a larger print (which I do about once a year).

[conropl]

I'm curious how people's noise tolerance will change as display's are finally getting out of the 1080p rut. Apple just released a 5K (5120x2880) 27" iMac. At that res, my 1Ds2 can't actually fill the screen. The 7D and 1DX can only crop 64 pixels off the edge... The 5D3 gets a few hundred pixels cropping range... basically, you'll be pixel peeping un-cropped images when viewing your desktop wallpaper... you'll see the noise, but the pixels will be 4x smaller, so the noise appear super fine grained.

Off topic, but, I also think it's a (minor) business opportunity here. I'm thinking Jonathan and Joel could make some money selling desktop wallpapers for new 5K iMac owners. There won't be much else available, and their shots are fantastic. Jonathan covers all sorts of subjects from mountainous landscapes, to polar bear cubs... something for everyone.

The day is coming when the sceen will get thin enough and have the resolution to compete with large prints for space on people's walls. If the quality is good enough to replace large prints, then you can change your art on you walls to match the wall color of the day, or scroll through pictures. Already being done on small scale for desk top e-picture frames, and not that far from replacing wall art if the size and costs come down. For enough money you can probably do it today, but it may be to bulky for most peoples taste and wallet. If you can get hangable screens in the price range of framed pictures (currently not that far off for good quality framed picture), then the printed picture starts to become obsolete/novelty.

But it would probably get wasted on selfies.