I have little experience with having to do any noise reduction in my images. I have my 810's iso set to its native number and don't shoot any images where noise has been an issue.
Hi Marv, same with me, Low ISO shooter.
Having said that, a buddy is seeking advice on this particular topic. He shot a number of long exposure night images (raw) on a recent trip where he had his in-camera (Nikon d600) noise controls turned off. Some of his images seem to be quite noisy (reminds me of serious grain back in the old days on film scanned images) and is asking for my input on how to best mitigate the noise.
Longer exposure times (> 1 second) will add a progressively worse amount of Dark Current noise, and Dead/Hot-pixels. That's why most cameras offer a Darkframe or long exposure noise reduction, which on Auto usually kicks in at 1 or 2 seconds and longer.
The best way of tackling such noise however, is by using multiple exposures that can be averaged, and multiple flatframe (also called offset or bias) images and multiple darkframe images. Best done in Raw
before demosaicing.
He used Lightroom to process. My initial thought was to re-process the images using the Nikon software and introduce the noise reduction control(s) during that stage. Is this the same as having the noise reduction turned on in-camera and, if not, can anyone point to a decent noise reduction tutorial (Lightroom)?
No, for single images, it helps to let the camera perform darkframe subtraction. It will reduce the most objectionable noise, at the cost of slightly increasing overall noise, and having to wait between exposures for the additional darkframe shot. Removing long exposure noise is harder for postprocessing without blackframes and such, so it depends on the quality of the Denoising application how successful that can be.
Franzis Denoise Projects Professional program is supposed to help in that process, although I have not tested yet how well that functions, and if it can also be done with Raw converted TIFFs. TIFFs are less ideal for such multi-exposure noise reduction compared to Raw, but I'm not that impressed with the Raw conversion capabilities of the Francis Projects software (but then I'm spoiled by Capture One's quality).
Cheers,
Bart
