Excessive noise in S3 shots?

[Jennifer]

My S3 is only a couple weeks old and I've noticed excessive noise in some shots. The first few shots I took with the S3 were indoor shots w/ and w/o the flash, macro and supermacro shots of flowers, and some outdoor shots. I think most of these were taken in the auto mode. They looked really good. Then I started noticing a lot of my daytime outdoor shots of my kids had alot of noise. I think these shots were taken in either the portrait or sports modes.

Are there some modes that are more susceptible to noise than others? What should I look for? Or do I have a bad S3?

Please help. I'm getting tired of running the majority of my photos through noiseware. :(

-Jen

[Jennifer]

After carefully reviewing some of the macro shots I originally thought were good, now I'm starting to see noise. What's wrong with my camera? Or am I just that bad at taking pictures? :(

I posted a couple pics here: http://dougandjen.com/s3


-Jen

[coldrain]

Set the ISO of your camera at 50 or 100 in sunny outside days. That will reduce noise a lot. You can do that in P mode, i do not know what other modes you can influence ISo (I can not try it since I have no S2 or S3).

[BowerR64]

Yeah your ISO was at 400 with those pictures. IMO that doesnt look to bad for being at 400ISO. Look how fast your shutter speed is! If you crop those pictures down they should clean up nicely.

The one of the girl looks good. It is in auto ISO but im not sure what it was in when the shot snapped.

[Jennifer]

Please forgive my ignorance, and laziness for looking this up somewhere, but is the ISO and shutter speed directly related?

I'm almost positive that the answer is yes as I believe I read somewhere that the ISO is like film speed, but I'm still not exactly sure how to determine what ISO setting I need for particular situations... :confused:

Well, good to know that my S3 is working okay. I was worried there for a min.

-Jen

[Jennifer]

Yeah your ISO was at 400 with those pictures. IMO that doesnt look to bad for being at 400ISO. Look how fast your shutter speed is! If you crop those pictures down they should clean up nicely.

The one of the girl looks good. It is in auto ISO but im not sure what it was in when the shot snapped.

How can you tell what the ISO was for those pics? I checked the properies on the file but never saw anything that said ISO. Should I be looking for something else? :confused:

[GaryS]

On the S3 you can set the ISO setting to Auto, so that you don't need to worry about it until you are ready to...

The ISO setting is stored in the EXIF data from the pic, most image editors will show you the setting, but you can't see it with standard XP properties.

[Jennifer]

Okay, I just looked at the EXIF properties via ZoomBrowser and saw the ISO info. I had been looking at the properties in WinXP's file system and from Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0. ZoomBrowser's info is much more complete.

[BowerR64]

Yeah thats what i had to do, save it then open zoombrowser.

[Alnath]

noise also always looks worse when the image is viewed full size.

[BowerR64]

I normaly take a picture in the max size the camera shoots at, then i shrink the image down usualy 50% then crop it. I dont know if this is good or bad but it looks good to my eye. I dont view things on my computer larger then 1024X768 so i get it small enough to fit on my screen.

[David Metsky]

ISO is like film sensitivity, the higher the ISO the less light is needed to take a picture. As a result, when the ISO is set high the camera can use a faster shutter speed. When you using the Auto mode, the camera may select a high ISO like 400 in order to push the shutter speed as fast as possible. This is likely what is happening for your indoor, low-light, no flash, shots.

High ISO=noise, so when you are outside and know that you don't need an ultra-fast shutter speed, set it to 50 or 100. The camera will compensate by using a slower shutter speed, but you won't have a problem since there's plenty of light.

Indoors without a flash the camera is trying to keep the shutter speed as fast as possible. If you kept the ISO at 50 or 100 the camera would need to keep the shutter open longer, and your subject or your hands would move while during the photo, resulting in blurry shots.

So, by setting the ISO manually you can eliminate some of the noise you are seeing in some shots.

-dave-