Is it just me? (seeing noise in images)

tijuana taxi

tijuana taxi

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Rich
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Yes
or does anyone else have trouble seeing noise in images and sometimes sharpness too

Quite often see a shot that gets called noisy and for the life of me can't really see it, not so bad with the sharpness, but sometimes its not that obvious.

Is this a sign of ageing/worn out eyes or some other optical problem I wonder.
 
dont see the noise as much but image softness I do, theres a thread on the Fuji X100 and people shouting about how tack sharp it is and all I see are soft images that look like an ok kit lens, when I see an image thats sharp its really sharp and obvious, maybe everyones standards are different;);):cool:
 
I think quality of monitor/display and the way it's set up plays a BIG part in this too ;)
 
How much you zoom in is a key to seeing noise etc. But yeah I agree with Rich. A lot of the time people take the whole noise thing way too seriously.

Even images in low light from my Panasonic GF2 can often look just as good as those from the 1DmkIV I sold by the time images have been through my noise reduction software and shrunk to web size they all look pretty much the same.
 
EMA747 said:
How much you zoom in is a key to seeing noise etc. But yeah I agree with Rich. A lot of the time people take the whole noise thing way too seriously.

Even images in low light from my Panasonic GF2 can often look just as good as those from the 1DmkIV I sold by the time images have been through my noise reduction software and shrunk to web size they all look pretty much the same.
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before digital we all saw images at roughly the same size ie 5x7 or 4x6 snaps and everything looks ok at that size, its only with Digital and pixel dense monitors can we automatically zoom to 100% and more which has made us critical of anything that isnt sharp at that range, besson and 'the others' didnt have sharp images they had 'great' images and no-one questioned or commented on the sharpness or noise but on the image itself:thumbs:
I'm now becoming more tolerant of the content of the image rather than the quality of the image which is completely irrelevant if its a treasured family moment or similar:thumbs:
 
I rarely see noise, sharpness more so but not to the amount some other people do. However I never really zoom into 100% when I'm viewing other peoples images.
 
I see a lot of images that are criticised for not being sharp when to my eyes they are razor sharp. More often than not it transpired that no sharpening was applied to the images and the audience were simply expecting an image to be sharpened in PP. IME sharpening is not neccesary very often. In fact a lot of images that are praised for being sharp and in focus are, to me, quite obviously sharpened in PP, and look somewhat artificial.

The same is true for noise. I see noise in a few photos, especially those that have been cropped, but give me noise and detail rather than a plastic looking images that have been de-noised and then sharpend to try and get some detail back. I like noise, it gives a bit of character to the photo.

These days too many people are obsessing over the pixels rather than obsessing over the picture. The latter is, of course, what they should be doing.
 
cherokee1111 said:
before digital we all saw images at roughly the same size ie 5x7 or 4x6 snaps and everything looks ok at that size, its only with Digital and pixel dense monitors can we automatically zoom to 100% and more which has made us critical of anything that isnt sharp at that range, besson and 'the others' didnt have sharp images they had 'great' images and no-one questioned or commented on the sharpness or noise but on the image itself:thumbs:
I'm now becoming more tolerant of the content of the image rather than the quality of the image which is completely irrelevant if its a treasured family moment or similar:thumbs:
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Absolutely agree with that. When I was doing 35mm developing during my A-level photography course (about 10 years ago now!) I never remember anyone getting too hung up on noise and sharpness. We used to look at each others work and I only really remember people saying things like "that's a great expression on that guys face" rather than "look at that noise". ;)
 
Glad its not just me then and thanks for the reassurance, thought I just wasn't looking properly

The one thing I can see almost straight away is an over sharpened picture, seen some hideous examples of that
 
tijuana taxi said:
Glad its not just me then and thanks for the reassurance, thought I just wasn't looking properly

The one thing I can see almost straight away is an over sharpened picture, seen some hideous examples of that
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Yeah people are way too hung up on noise and sharpness at 100%. How often did we ever look at film magnified to that extent? Anyway I tend to agree with Jay Maisel who said 'I'm interested in picture quality, not pixel quality'.
 
EMA747 said:
Absolutely agree with that. When I was doing 35mm developing during my A-level photography course (about 10 years ago now!) I never remember anyone getting too hung up on noise and sharpness. We used to look at each others work and I only really remember people saying things like "that's a great expression on that guys face" rather than "look at that noise". ;)
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Or 'fabulous grain on that' if it was shot with pushed HP5 :)
 
lensflair said:
Yeah people are way too hung up on noise and sharpness at 100%. How often did we ever look at film magnified to that extent? Anyway I tend to agree with Jay Maisel who said 'I'm interested in picture quality, not pixel quality'.
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One important aspect of this comparion is of course that analogue (film) noise is much more pleasing to the eye than digital noise... (applies as much to photographs as it does to music) - and also degrades much more gracefully on overexposure instead of just clipping (which is one reason why many DoP's prefer shooting features on 35mm to digital)

but yes, I have to agree its laughable that some people would instantly dismiss the work of the classic photographers on technical grounds ("oh no, this Ansell Adams tog has got blown-out highlights in the sky and I can't resolve every twig on the other side of the canyon, I shall never look at his photographs again" etc...)
 
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