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Originally Posted by pressld2  I may be overly fussy but I still don't think the high ISO performance is very impressive and still won't go above ISO 400 unless I'm desperate. |
Okay, I'm now going to eat humble pie and promise never to say that again. I must remember that raw means raw - it doesn't do any in-camera processing of the image. This includes high ISO noise reduction. It leaves everything to the photographer to do in the raw conversion process.
The trouble is that either the noise reduction in Lightroom v1.4 is not very good or I don't know how to use it properly. The upshot is that when shooting in raw above ISO 400 I get noisy images and find it impossible to reduce the noise in post-processing without losing image detail.
I remember working all this out shortly after getting the camera and experimenting with shooting in jpeg and also using Capture NX for the raw conversion - both of which produced significantly better results. See
My D300.... I finished that post by saying "I just need to go out and play a lot more". But I didn't do that - I just set the camera back to raw and carried on shooting at ISO 200 with the occasional blip up to 400.
So, inspired by Nicola's excellent ISO 1600 treecreeper, I nipped out this evening and shot a few images of my own at that speed. I was going to shoot in jpeg but then rememebered that the D300 has tiff setting so I used that instead.
Here's a black swan (black being the colour that shows noise the most)...
...and here's a 100% crop from that image...
There's a slight softening of the image when viewed at 100% but the noise control is excellent.
I'm going to have "When shooting at ISO 1600 use tiff" tattooed on the inside of my eyeballs so I don't forget this lesson again!
Dave P.