Shooting highschool football here in central florida is like shooting in a cave. ISO 12000+ to get 1/800 at f2.8.
Even my d4 has a fair amount of noise here.
I am still learning C1, but I often like the output more than lightroom- although I have used lightroom since the beginning.
My only real issue if noise. Lightroom and dxo seem to handle this much better.
Any thoughts? How are you handling noise? Do I need to export it to photoshop and then bring it back into C1?
Hi Gary,
Having/adding more light for the initial image capture should significantly benefit image quality. Shooting at ISO's above 1600 is generally detrimental to image quality, and it may be better to stick to ISO 1600 and then underexpose for the required shutterspeed. That will also allow to more easily capture highlights without clipping them.
Given a noisy image capture, I prefer to use a dedicated noise reduction program, like "Topaz Labs Denoise" or "NeatImage". The reason I prefer that over built-in noise reduction in Capture One (or e.g. Lightroom), is that these programs offer much more control over the noise reduction process and they produce very good results.
NeatImage allows to create and store noise profiles that can be automatically chosen for new images, e.g. for a specific camera, and ISO setting, after Raw conversion to TIFF output (with EXIF metadata). Topaz Denoise automatically analyses the image on a case by case basis. Another interesting alternative is DxO's PRIME noise reduction, but it only works on Raw conversions and those are limited to Adobe RGB output space. There are more alternatives.
The benefit of using C1 noise reduction is that it simplifies the workflow, which may be relevant for sports photography when processing time is limited, e.g. due to deadlines. So you should see what weighs more heavily and whether the built-in noise reduction quality is adequate for a first run. You can always reprocess selected images to higher quality if time is less of an issue.
So, to summarize. I'd try and improve the initial capture lighting situation, and underexpose at something like ISO 1600 to meet shutter speed requirements, in order to improve the fundamental capture quality. Then compare the quality of built-in versus external noise reduction. Use C1 noise reduction for speed gains in the workflow, then re-process selected images.
In all cases, if you don't need full resolution, downsampling can help to reduce the apparent noise. So try filling the frame with the image to avoid excessive cropping. Capture One's improved resampling quality really helps, especially if you only use output sharpening after resampling.
Cheers,
Bart