Noisy & Super dark shadows

hunter349

Lately my shots have been coming out with very dark and noisy shadows. Even in bright sunlight the shadows are coming out this way. I shot about 100 images at a race on a bright day and the images look great as far as saturation and contrast until you look at the weird noisy shadows. I shot them all at relatively fast shutter speeds 250-1000 with a modest Iso of 400-800. I was shooting with a Nikon D300

Does anyone know why this would happen? Or how I could keep it from happening?

Pupator

Can you post a couple of examples with full EXIF?

hunter349

Sure Here are a couple examples. They are a little flat and the colors are a bit washed out but it shows what I'm up against pretty well. The blacks are extremely dark and noisy and the super contrast/noise is pretty visible in the dark blues and Reds as well.

hunter349

Crap it looks like the exif Data did not stick with the images. They were both shot with the following settings. They were just converted in Adobe Raw with no adjustments and saved as jpg (after reducing size by 50% for web) No other adjustments to the image have been made.


Camera: D300
Lens: VR 18-55mm
Focal Length: 42mm (For Blue Car) 24mm (For Orange Car)
Focus Mode" AF-C
AF Area Mode: Auto
VR: On
AF Fine Tune: Off
Aperture: F14
Shutter Speed: 1/200s
Exposure Mode: Manual
Exposure Comp: 0EV
Metering: Matrix
ISO: 500
Flash: No Flash
White Balance: Auto
Color Space: sRGB
Active D-Lighting: Normal
Picture Control: Vivid
Image Quality: RAW (14Bit)

MarkR

I don't see any pictures.

hunter349

They show up on mine but there is a good chance I may have done something weird when posting them. Here are the direct links to the pictures at the image hosting site they are on.
http://s2.postimage.org/ylcixevsh/DSC_8261.jpg
http://s2.postimage.org/ylckky8a9/DSC_8291.jpg

aj986s

I'm not 100% certain, but my guess is that the camera's age and the relatively high ISO may be contributing. I see you shot in RAW, which is good. However, not easy to tell for sure as the online pics are JPEG. Are those shadow's blown out in the original RAW file? If so, then the lack of information/detail could be contributing to the noise issue when converting to another format. I know that ISO 500 isn't terribly high, but technology has dramatically improved since the 300D's intro in 2003. You might be able to do some PP on the shadow areas to offset some of the noise.

MarkR

Ah. webfilter at work is blocking it. Category: Sex. You must be doing something right! :lol

hunter349

Category Sex? Lol Maybe some of those guys in the background are doing something.

Yea I know the D300 is pretty old. ( I've been holding out for almost a year on going Full Frame until the D700 replacement comes) But It has handled these kind of shots before without problem. I went through my settings and found that the Dynamic range compensation was set to the highest setting. That might be it but it wouldn't make much sense to me because the dynamic range in the shots looks very low.

The only other possibility I have come up with myself is the fact that I shot at F14 with a fast shutter speed. Plenty of light from the sky was getting in but those shadows really couldn't develop with such a small aperture and fast shutter. Maybe opening it up and using an even faster shutter or lower Iso would have helped.

When I locally adjust the exposure in Raw the shadows actually show some decent detail but they are still so noisy it's almost painful to look at.

zoomer

Shoot these at F4 not F14. Reduce your iso to 200. Increase your black point on these shots.

Don't look at your shadows at high magnificaton.

Sometimes blocking out the shadows or blowing the highlights is no big deal.

hunter349

zoomer wrote: »

Shoot these at F4 not F14. Reduce your iso to 200. Increase your black point on these shots.

Don't look at your shadows at high magnificaton.

Sometimes blocking out the shadows or blowing the highlights is no big deal.

Thanks. When you say increase black point, you mean during RAW conversion? Just block out the shadows to at least get rid of most of that noise? I think that's what I'm going to have to do with most of them. Some I have been able to save by increasing fill light and using Noise Ninja filter to reduce
luminescence noise.

zoomer

If you get your black and white points right it will look better. Did you increase the exposure on these which is what gave you all that noise you are seeing?

Shoot these at F4 200 iso should give you plenty of shutter speed next time. You shouldn't need to use highlight fill on shots like this.

Why are shooting in Raw if you are not going to process the photos?
Just shoot them in Jpeg and set you camera settings how you like the photos to look. Then you can take advantage of the active D-lighting which works great in the full sun. Put your lens on F4 and auto ISO.
Set your blinkies so you know if you are blowing the shot out (which auto ISO and Active D will really help stop) adjust if necessary using exposure compensation.

Shoot Standard not Vivid. If you get your levels right there will be plenty of color without using Vivid.

Turn your d-lighting off if you are shooting Raw.

hunter349

I am processing all of them. I just did not process these because I wanted to show how wacky they looked straight from the camera.

zoomer

Sorry but they don't look wacky to me for raw shots in those condition with those settings.

Here is your before and after, selected the sky (sloppily) darkened a bit, inversed did a levels adjustment on the bottom increased contrast, sharpened a smidge, added saturation. I think the main problem with this shot is that at f14 it is not sharp, noise doesn't ruin this shot.

Trying to help....just say so and I will take the pics down.

ziggy53

Do you mind if I take a run at processing the blue Cobra a bit?

hunter349

Not at all, go ahead.

ziggy53

This was the starting point, your posted capture at the 1024 resolution:



From here I used ACR to open the image and I reduced the contrast, increased Brightness, increased Clarity and increased Vibrance. (The exact values of Clarity and Vibrance will vary by subject matter and resolution, but I typically keep Vibrance much lower than Clarity.)

This is the image as it came from ACR:



Finally, in PSCS4, I sharpened using a high-pass sharpening action, based on this discussion (but not using the same settings):

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=2064

I used Neat Image (NI) to reduce noise in stages; first I sampled the noise in the wheel-wells to get the worst-case, I applied the NR, reduced the NR using Edit-Fade to around 20 percent of what NI applied.

Then I created a new layer and applied the full amount of NI noise reduction to that layer, adjusting the effect by blending with the background layer. (The concept is regulate the noise reduction in blending to keep the most fine detail, generally in the highlights, while reducing the noise almost completely in the shadows, where there is little visible detail.)

Then I used a LAB action to improve the color saturation in both highlight and shadow colors. It has little impact on middle-tones and flesh tones. This exaggerated the blues and reds and I could see that those colors were now a little "off"; the reds has some magenta cast as well as the color tone needed to be throttled back a bit. I used Image-Adjustments-Hue/Sat to reign in the reds. The blues were showing too much purple so I used ACR to color shift back to blues. (Understand that some of these color artifacts are due to the LAB action, not your starting image.) Finally, I used PictoColor iCorrect Portrait to tweak the flesh tones, which also warmed the whites just a smidge.

The darkest tones also now had some color bleed from the blue car and blue sky, so I erased the LAB enhanced layer at those regions to reveal the previous layer (before the LAB color enhancements).

Finally I used Levels to close up the shadows and tighten the highlight and then a very sharp Curves S-contrast curve to give deep shadows and bright highlights.

Here is the end result:



Here is a cycling GIF that shows the starting image, ACR adjustments and final resulting image: