Originally posted by TroutHunterJohn Hi Norm. Nice bird captures. What do you use to clean up the noise when shooting at 1600 ISO, if anything? I'm shooting a K3ii and pick up bothersome noise in shadows when shooting anything much over 800.
~ John
The key here is understanding reciprocity, when I shoot 1600 ISO, I shoot in bright light to keep my shutter sped up. Reciprocity says shooing at 1600 in bright light with high intensity at say 1/1000s will produce ,much less noise than shooting the same ISO at 1/30s or longer. I've found this to be true even at 1/125s. The other advice is too set up to not shoot shadows. Those of us used to shooting film will do this instinctively , most film was less than 7 EV. I'm sure at 1600, my k-3 is still getting 10 EV or more. SO, I try and stay away from direct light and dark shadows, unless as in these pictures, my light source is quite low. SO essentially, if you're using 1600 to attain shutter speed for birds in bright light, less noise, shooting landscapes with a K-3 or K5, I really don't like to go over 400 ISO because of noise at slow shutter speeds, but also because of loss of Dynamic Range.
Aperture applies a K-3 profile to my images which cleans up quite a bit of noise before I even see them in my software, so I shouldn't say I don't do anything, Aperture does a lot. But for many images I don't apply any noise reduction.
I'd look back through my first K-3 files to show you how much difference the Apple profile makes, but that was 2 years ago, and I can't find those images.
Aperture does it automatically now, I just looked back through my library and found one of my first 800 ISO images that I took with the K-3. Aperture updated the profile right before my eyes. it went from sharp crisp noise to soft almost un-noticeable noise, right before my eyes.