GRRR! Noise!!!

[mugsisme]

Yeah, right, OK, so I listened a friend who has a lovely nice Nikon camera with two very fancy lenses. OK, so her father has a camera shop and she got the 17-50 f/2 and that other fancy one, the $1700 one at cost, right? So I figured, she knows what she is doing, right? So she tells me, bump up your ISO. You can do it on here. I asked about noise, and she said it won't happen, because these are good cameras. WRONG. I took pictures at the children's museum today, using 2500. Terrible noise. No pictures put up yet since my flickr account is almost full right now. But is there any way to fix the pictures? I took them in RAW and JPEG Fine.

edited to add:
I just remembered that I played with my picture controls as well. If you move the contrast up slightly, will that make pictures appear washed out? I am uploading two pictures to flickr now.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2423/3782718229_2dcc2c4362_b.jpg

[XaiLo]

Try some noise removal and some sharpening Leah.


http://www.designsbyxailo.com/thepics/2009/08_Aug/leah3.jpg

[K1W1]

Imagenomic Noiseware Community Edition (http://www.imagenomic.com/nwsa.aspx) is a pretty good noise reduction package and it's the right price (free).

[mugsisme]

K1w1, can I use that in Linux? (I can ask DH to check for me.) I can always put it on my laptop, but I never use it for editing.

X, thanks. Are you at all famaliar with GIMP? I used unsharp mask once, but didn't think it really did anything. There are several noise tools, but I don't know what they are. Almost every single picture in this batch looked washed out. Except for the ones of the flowers. I went in and edited a bunch of them, but I haven't seen such washed out pictures in a long time.

[fionndruinne]

Yeah, looks like there's a little too much fill light/lack of contrast maybe. What aperture were you using? I've a hard time thinking ISO 2500 was necessary for that image, unless you were using a somewhat narrow aperture.

[Rooz]

thats a noisy pic ???

[achuang]

My D70s is noisier than that at ISO 1600, I don't think you really need to worry about noise all that much since it's better to get a sharp shot than a blurry but non-noisy shot.
I think you would have been better off using an external flash and bouncing it as it looks like a whitish colour ceiling, and silver walls.

[XaiLo]

It's been a very long time since I've played with GIMP. Try this these links out Leah.

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Smart_Sharpening/

http://registry.gimp.org/node/9836

http://sourceforge.net/projects/refocus/

http://www.flickr.com/groups/gimpusers/discuss/72157594162099948/

You can just do a simple s-curve to get rid of the washed out effect.

[Elisha]

I embrace some noise especially if there is detail in it. in your case i does not distract.
and pixel peeping is not gonna help either.

[ramblingman]

I'm looking at the pictures and they look great to me ....

[zqfmbg]

I'm looking at the pictures and they look great to me ....

I have to agree. Sure, there may be a bunch of noise if you're looking at 1:1, but honestly, that image is going to be far larger than your monitor. Even my 30" would have lower resolution than that.

What's the final target of the picture? Web photo? Print? Wall? :)

[benp]

K1w1, can I use that in Linux? (I can ask DH to check for me.) I can always put it on my laptop, but I never use it for editing.

X, thanks. Are you at all famaliar with GIMP? I used unsharp mask once, but didn't think it really did anything. There are several noise tools, but I don't know what they are. Almost every single picture in this batch looked washed out. Except for the ones of the flowers. I went in and edited a bunch of them, but I haven't seen such washed out pictures in a long time.

I don't think noise is a big problem with that picture. But anyway, if you're using Linux, Neat Image works perfectly in recent versions of Wine and seems to do a pretty decent job of noise removal.

(Autostitch also works via Wine if you're interested in panoramas...)