[RazzleBas]

I have a K-3 & a KP. When limiting my upper ISO range to 1600 in decent daylight, I've been turning off the noise reduction, as I fear it may do more harm than good in the auto setting at low readings. Am I doing the right thing? I'd be interested to hear other views on the subject.

[UncleVanya]

I have a K-3 & a KP. When limiting my upper ISO range to 1600 in decent daylight, I've been turning off the noise reduction, as I fear it may do more harm than good in the auto setting at low readings. Am I doing the right thing? I'd be interested to hear other views on the subject.

On my k-3 I kept noise reduction very low and relied on post processing for high iso. I think at 1600 I had it off. I let my k-3 go up to 3200 almost any time and I have shots at 25600 but they were made with the noise expected. With the KP I’ve left it at defaults and it is routinely allowed to shoot at 6400 and sometimes higher. It hasn’t disappointed me yet.

On the photons to photos Test results the accelerator chip seems to kick in around 600 iso and performs better in practice at that iso than at 400. So with the KP I feel like the defaults are working well enough that I don’t need to tune them.

[JensE]

The adjustable high-ISO noise reduction settings apply to the JPEG files, not to recorded raw data. I often turn on DNG+JPEG mode when I potentially want to use the out of camera JPEGs. In auto mode, the KP keeps a light-handed approach to noise reduction, which I like. So the only "harm" is higher battery use and processing time in the camera. For more refined post-processing, I start over from the DNG anyway.

[hcc]

Personally, I do not use in-camera noise reduction. I prefer to PP afterwards, using DCU or Noiseware. This gives me more control of the noise reduction to apply.

My 5 cents...

[Michail_P]

Οn my k-70 I use low NR in general, for jpeg. After testing it out at most NR levels, I don’t think I prefer the detail decreasing that much. Mostly shooting at 12800iso and below.

[Alex645]

I have a K-3 & a KP. When limiting my upper ISO range to 1600 in decent daylight, I've been turning off the noise reduction, as I fear it may do more harm than good in the auto setting at low readings. Am I doing the right thing? I'd be interested to hear other views on the subject.

The adjustable high-ISO noise reduction settings apply to the JPEG files, not to recorded raw data.

NR has no effect on RAW or DNG files, but if you're shooting jpegs, NR certainly helps in the shadows and in general at higher ISOs.

The only negative effect is that your frames per second or time between shots will increase as the processor needs to work on applying noise reduction to the jpeg. So shooting bursts with continuous drive of sports or wildlife? You may miss a few shots with it on. Landscapes and night photography? No rush, turn it on.

[wealth]

I prefer doing the noise reduction in the post processing, doing that will make me be in charge

[vijaykishan]

Personally, I do not use in-camera noise reduction. I prefer to PP afterwards, using DCU or Noiseware. This gives me more control of the noise reduction to apply.

My 5 cents...

This! One can selectively apply NR to areas where it doesn’t mess up with the details. For example an aggressive NR would be ok for clear sky, but not for areas where there are details. in PP one can selectively apply in different dimension/channel - pattern, Luma,Chroma etc.

One must note that most the time the prevalent noise type is shot-noise- nothing can be done about this though :-/ unless you use AI to fill inthe details that the photons have missed.

[artrasa]

I don't think my camera (K10D) even has any options for noise reduction, it only has the long-exposure noise reduction. I reckon it should remove some hot pixels, or pixels that always appear bright, that are often present in CCD image sensors. Even though it's on, when doing long exposures I still get quite many pixels that are 100 % red, blue or green. Perhaps the sensor from 2006 is starting to show its age?

For high-ISO raw photos I use the noise reduction feature in the image processing software I use (DigiKam). It removes the annoying colourful "confetti" noise but leaves some grain to the image. Nonetheless I rarely shoot ISO 1600 with this camera and generally try to stay at, or under ISO 800.