Originally Posted by jmbower
2) These are RAW shots imported into Picasa, and saved directly to Jpeg, without any additional editing past whatever Picasa does automatically.
That's the problem, Picasa will auto level those dark photos, which will bump up and show all those noise in the picture. I have seen it does it to mine. that's why I have never use it again and moved on to Silkpix and Lightroom.