New article comparing various E1 ISO settings

[Ian]

E1 ISO comparison (http://fourthirdsphoto.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=27&Itemi d=34)

Hope it\'s of use.

Post edited by: Ian, at: 2005/09/12 18:17

[Steve]

You hit the important point in your comparison. Getting a correct exposure is the key to shooting high ISO. If you miss on the dark side you will have a tough time fixing it. I shoot with ISO 800 and 1600 with the E-1 on a regular basis. I have found that setting the monitor brightness to -7 I can get the exposure right by checking the monitor. If you hit the right exposure, you can make nice 8x10 prints using ISO 1600. I use noise ninja to clean it up.
Steve

[Den]

Thanks for the article, Ian! Interestingly, what I took away from it was something you didn\'t actually explicitly point out: if you want to shoot at 800ASA+, shoot in RAW! (I\'m a hardened JPEG shooter, and RAW is my transparency equivalent: would never have thought to have shot RAW in high ASA situations if it hadn\'t been for your article!)

Steve: I really liked your post but only half understood it. How, exactly, do you expose for the shadows? do you spot meter a dark patch and then underexpose some more? Apologies in advance if this sounds dumb...

[Bojan Volcansek]

What Steve meant is that you have to have correct expopsure with high ISO (ASA) setting. If you underexposure a photo, once when you try to correct exposure in postprocessing, noise will show much more especially in the shadows.

With high iso, always try to shoot with exposure, or even use \"shoot to the right\" technique.

Sincerely yours
Bojan

[robh3]

Funny thing.

You can\'t always expect high-iso performance to be good on the E-1. I mean, if the subject is dark, you\'ll get a lot of noise in the image. I have an example here @iso400 ;

http://www.bukta.no/tiff05/P9061235www.jpg

Here is the fullsize;www.bukta.no/tiff05/P9061235.jpg

One person at the dpreview forums stated this was \"horrible\" and that I should have my camera checked. I though the noise is pretty damn smooth, except for the slight bluish colours various places. Funny thing is that they don\'t show up at all on print, this makes for a decent A3 print. Nothing wrong with it.

If I\'d exposed it more, some highlights would have blown out, like in the tram that\'s passing on the right side.

Comments ?

-r-

[Den]

I have this (completely unfounded) theory that dSLRs are better or worse when it comes to ISO, largely because of in-camera processing - and I suspect the E-1 doesn\'t do much. Certainly, spot-on exposure seems to be critical to the success of a high ISO shot, but there\'s no getting away from NoiseNinja, Kodak Digital GEM (my favourite) or other similar noise reduction software. Played around with shooting at 800ASA in RAW this evening. Here\'s a picture of my toy dog, shot in room that was unlit except for a very dim bed-side lamp about a metre away... Post-processed with Digital GEM, and converted to B&W using TheImagingFactory\'s excellent plug-in...

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/170/1449/1600/P9130565.jpg

Sadly, I have to agree with the other guy about grain...I\'ve loaded up your original image in Photoshop - although it looks an awful lot better than the browser version...I\'ve had pictures like this printed and have been sorely disappointed... :-(

PS Cheers for the tip, Bojan!

Post edited by: Den, at: 2005/09/13 17:24

Post edited by: Den, at: 2005/09/13 17:25

[robh3]

Well, this is all a matter of dynamics. If you shoot with exposure correct for shadows, shadows will obviously become less noisy. If you shoot a raw file, to match exposure (that is intensity of light in image) to the original scene, you\'ll end up with a more noisy image if it has a lot of shadow.

Doing hdr might help, but like in my shot is impossible, because it has movement in it as well.

I really think your comments about this particular picture beeing a bad one are strange. Why ? Becuase the picture has mainly shadows with difficult texture. I DO think this would have looked better on film though. Grain is however, about the same as on iso400.

Could you post a fullsize crop of the dogs right eye ?

Post edited by: robh3, at: 2005/09/13 17:32

[hammer_400]

the colors still seem pretti constant throughout...
has anyone done a series of color vs iso? to see how iso effects the color output?