I was wondering how many people here use noise reduction on their high ISO shots. I've just recently done a few shots using ISO 1600 purely for the sake of experimenting. I was extremely pleased with the results. The only anoying thing was what seems to be a dead pixel close to the center of the picture. A small green dot.
Apple Aperture does a small amount of noise reduction on RAW images automaticly which also eliminated the dead pixel. Apart from this, I've set the camera so it doesn't apply noise reduction, as I prefear to do this myself on the computer.
I have Noise Ninja plugin for Apple Aperture, and after having run a few shots through the program, I have to admit, that on every picture I actually prefear the shot that hasn't been sent through noise ninja. I find that if you just avoid pixel peeping and view it at a size which equals what one would view when printing, the noise isn't intrusive and noise reduction just ends up killing a lot of the details. I found that I'd much rather have my images unprocessed by noise reduction software.
I started wondering if others feel the same. What are your views on noise reduction.
I also tried turning off the Aperture noise reduction that it performs by default, and the only difference I can see when viewing at normal size is that it eliminates dead pixels. The rest of the noise reduction I can only see when pixel peeping, and so it doesn't seem to damage the detail. I therefore keep it turned on so I don't have to deal with the dead pixel myself. I also noticed that the in camera jpeg also removes the dead pixel, but even the unprocessed PEF file looked better than the jpeg. Mind you though, as I said, Aperture has a bunch of presets it uses on RAW files and the values depend on which camera the RAW file came from, so I'm not really looking at a pure RAW file.
This shot was taken at ISO 1600. I was not expecting this amount of quality from the K200D concidering it's relatively cheap price. It's certainly good enough for documentation purposes such as photography for local newspapers which I have done a couple of times.
Go to
here to download the jpeg with full resolution.