Originally posted by zombieCat Well, it's quite possible *I'm* the idiot here
. Yes, the mottled gray area (I updated the photo and drew a red box around it). I wasn't expecting to see this at low ISO in a light box.
Those areas are pretty close to black. It seems to me that ff there's going to be noise at low ISO, as the difference between "1" and "2" is a lot bigger than the difference between "253" and "254". Well, whether or not that simplistic explanation really applies, the phenomenon is really. Anyhow, if that's a 100% crop, and no one else can see what you're talking about, and you can only see it on one monitor, chance are, that monitor is just turned up too bright and is exposing differences between "1" and "2" that shouldn't really be so visible. Most monitors are calibrated far too bright - good for reading text, bad for evaluating pictures. Definition consider calibration between simply chucking the monitor.
But in any case, when seeing tiny amounts of noise in deep shadows like this, the simple fix is to push those values even darker in PP using levels and/or curves. You could also try using NR, but tht seems overkill - it would probably kill some detail too.
Quote: Would shooting RAW ignore these settings?
Well, the setting wouldn't affect the raw data itself - nor does your turning NR on in camera, for that matter. But many raw processing programs do look at the EXIF to see what settings you used and then try to reproduce them in their own default conversion. In an case, whether or not the settings are honored by your raw software automatically, you could certainly just move the sliders yourself (or create a preset that has a combination of settings you find you like).