Processing high ISO images - Help please

[DonnaM]

I would appreciate advice and opinions on the best way to process high ISO and hence noisy images where significant sharpening is required.

Using LR and CS4, where and in what sequence do you apply sharpening and noise reduction?
1. In Adobe Camera Raw then fine tune in CS4
2. No ACR adjustments and do noise and sharpening on different layers in CS4
3. Use a 3rd party noise and sharpening plug-ins in CS4
4. ???? What I have not thought of

I know at the end of the day it is trying to make a silk purse from a sow's ear but there has to be a best way to extract the most from the shot.

 

[Bobtographer]

higher than ISO800 I don't sharpen my images

 

[tdodd]

I'm no expert on NR, but I think the answer depends on many things such as.....

- how big are you printing/displaying?
- are there fine(ish) details to be preserved?
- just how high is the ISO we're talking about?
- how good are the exposures? are they exposed correctly, underexposed, ETTR?
- why is "significant" sharpening required? can you quantify that?
- how much tradeoff are you prepared to accept between noise vs detail?
- which camera are you using? is it the D300? Different cameras have different noise. Different noise has different NR requirements.

Bottom line, there probably is not a "one size fits all" approach. Each situation must be judged on its own merits.

Personally I use Lightoom alone for my processing and rarely adjust the NR from defaults, but I do adjust sharpening - especially the mask - so that I am not sharpening up the noise. Here's a an example from my 7D at 6,400 ISO. This is almost the full image (slight crop top and bottom), resized, and NR and sharpening are at Lightroom defaults, although I have increased the sharpening mask to 50.....

Here's one from my 1D3 at 3,200 ISO. No edits except white balance. It might be "high ISO", but I would not say it needs NR...

Maybe the best thing would be to upload a raw file somewhere that is representative of what you are working with and then people can figure out the best approach for that photo.

 

[DonnaM]

Thanks Guys, I was wondering if I was going to get any response to this so I have been experimenting myself and my conclusion is not to use Adobe in the Raw processing.

Tim, I shoot birds mostly and under trees the light is poor and I need feather detail.

Thanks for taking the time to reply but I think I have sussed it now.