Help - Grainy Images

gwendolyn

I shot group alter shots for a wedding in RAW because I could not get the lighting right. I was using just an external flash and no flash was too dark, and flash made it overexposed. So I shot with and without flash in RAW hoping to be able to fix it afterwards. When I transfered the pics to Lightroom they were converted to DNG and were GRAINY! More grainy than any pics I've ever had. ISO was 1600.

Was it just too high ISO, low light, both, or does it have something to do with being in RAW or DNG. Will it change when I convert it to JPEG?

arodney

gwendolyn wrote:

Was it just too high ISO, low light, both, or does it have something to do with being in RAW or DNG. Will it change when I convert it to JPEG?

Its is a noisy capture due to high ISO and the fact you may have under exposed as well (under exposure increases noise in shadows. See http://www.digitalphotopro.com/technique/camera-technique/exposing-for-raw.html). And no, it will not get any better once a JPEG (if anything, worse due to compression).

At this point, might want to render the best possible version, then run NoiseWare in Photoshop (3rd party plug-in). It does an amazingly good job.

Also, sizing a large document down to a smaller one will help, as noise is random and interpolating down will average away some of that noise.

Bsimon

You can also download Neat Image. Very good/fast program.

MrBook2

Also check out Noise Ninja. I think there is a plugin for Photoshop. It is also built into Bibble.