Why does shooting in RAW do this??

Morph3ous

Morph3ous

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I started shooting in RAW quite some time ago, so I could make the most of the Post Processing options given by LR3 and CS5. Every now and again however, I find my RAW images are spoiled by some form of white noise. Almost like they've been oversharpened. I dont see it all the time, and I dont know whats causing it. Any ideas?

To help describe, i've shot some random images after setting the camera to capture a RAW and Large JPEG at the same time. These 100% crops show you the difference, and the 'noise' i'm trying to decribe. They've been imported into Lightroom 3 with no alterations made. I have the up-to-date Camera Raw 6.4 Plug-in.

Images on the left are RAW, on the right are JPEG


Comparison by Minnis Photography, on Flickr

Please help, I dont want to stop shooting RAW.

Thanks
 
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Looks to me like extremely high ISO setting as neither are particularly 'clean'.

If you mean the lighter highlights in the RAW image could be due to the fact that it isn't compressed so is showing more detail.

What camera and lens combination are you using?
 
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Hi

Not an expert here but I'd take a guess at the camera settings applied to Jpeg is masking what the RAW is actually capturing.

Andy
 
Thanks for the replies guys.

I posted the same thing on another Forum I use (increase the target audience and all that) and it turns out Lightroom 3 was adding some sharpening to all my images by default! I've since lowered the value and reset the default and now its much better.
 
I would say LR is sharpening the noise in your RAW version and also the jpg version has noise reduction applied in camera thats all.


EDIT: looking again it seems LR might have some noise reduction turned on, the colour noise at least is lower in the RAW file.
 
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Morph3ous said:
Thanks for the replies guys.

I posted the same thing on another Forum I use (increase the target audience and all that) and it turns out Lightroom 3 was adding some sharpening to all my images by default! I've since lowered the value and reset the default and now its much better.
Click to expand...

It's not so much the sharpening slider that is adding that pebble dash grain (it's not usally visable on prints) but the Detail Slider, reduce that and watch it disappear. I find the standard setting of 25 on the detail slider is to much for most images.
 
I've got into the habit of turning all in-camera sharpening OFF. It does seem to make a difference when you leave any sharpening to the end of your pp.
Andy.
 
Thanks for the info. Still learning LR3, so this really helps.

I'm getting a 60D at the end of the year and was starting to worry this RAW issue would haunt me, as I thought it was the software rather than the camera causing the problems.
 
OlyPaul said:
It's not so much the sharpening slider that is adding that pebble dash grain (it's not usally visable on prints) but the Detail Slider, reduce that and watch it disappear. I find the standard setting of 25 on the detail slider is to much for most images.
Click to expand...

Do this, and also raise the "masking". The default is about 10, and that will certainly sharpen noise. Go up to at least 30 for most images and your sharpening will be applied much more selectively.
 
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