Testing For Noise (d300) issues

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barneyrubble

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I think I have a noise issue with my D300.

I have been shooting only family stuff with it, and obviously won't be as good as the D3, but I have been so disappointed with the results with it that I never take it out of the bag.

I took it on a day out yesterday as I just couldn't get away with taking the D3, and I've looked at the images i took and they all seem to have a very fine grey speckle over them all (these are all ISO200 shots)

I think that there's something wrong with the camera, but I want to run some controlled tests. Can anyone give me any ideas on the best type test shots I can take? I tried taking it out at lunchtime in London, and got a couple of shots that were ok, but the backgrounds again have this grey speckle across them. I have never had this with any of my other DSLRS.

Any help will be gratefully appreciated.
 
noise2_1.jpg


noise????

haha sorry i needed a giggle. i have no idea.
 
Hey, that was me!

I don't think you should believe the hype about D300s. They aren't amazingly low noise. What they may be, though, are cameras which withstand an increase in ISO without a big noise increase.

My other camera is a D40, and, at low ISO, its photos are less noisy. They are also less detailed and less tonally refined.

I found that the best way to judge the noise on my D300's (raw) photos is to look at their histograms BEFORE any developing and see which parts of the image are affected most. Usually the bottom 30% of the histogram is the worst affected, and this can be exaggerated with positive exposure compensation, shadow fill, gamma correction and capture sharpening etc at the post-processing stage.

At the end of the day, there's no substitute for correct exposure to avoid noise, and the D300 isn't any more forgiving than any other camera.
 
If you want to look just at the noise get a black and a white piece of card and take a shot of them overlapping but have it completely out of focus. This will create a gradient showing you noise at all brightness levels and any "detail" you see is just noise as everything is OOF.
 
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