high noise/artifacts in stills raw or jpeg

[leecanning]

hi,
it seems that all the still shots i take with my p4p wether raw or jpeg all seem to have this excess noise/artifacts that are making most unusable for for photography business.
the shots are taken at iso100 in broad daylight. the pic look ok at first glance but upon zooming in you can see much of the noise, and as i produce panoramic shots that get printed in large sizes this will show up in the final product. noise reduction isnt a good option and shouldnt be needed at all .
can someone suggest to me any advice on how to ensure images come out sharp and noise free?

 

[Numone]

hi,
it seems that all the still shots i take with my p4p wether raw or jpeg all seem to have this excess noise/artifacts that are making most unusable for for photography business.
the shots are taken at iso100 in broad daylight. the pic look ok at first glance but upon zooming in you can see much of the noise, and as i produce panoramic shots that get printed in large sizes this will show up in the final product. noise reduction isnt a good option and shouldnt be needed at all .
can someone suggest to me any advice on how to ensure images come out sharp and noise free?

No image attached?

 

[leecanning]

see if that works

 

[leecanning]

here is another one, a raw file zoomed in in lightroom

 

[Numone]

Hmmmm... so what size are you trying to push these too? What was the other capture settings?

 

[Andrei V]

I guess it depends what you're comparing it to, Lee, and what your expectations are. I mean, it's still a 1" sensor. It's going to be considerably noisier than a full frame or medium format camera. Iso 100 on the p4p would be roughly equivalent to ISO 800 on a full frame camera in terms of noise. So about 3 times noisier. Not much you can do about that -- it's just physics.

I think you can get acceptable results for printing large panoramic images, but you're going to have to do some noise reduction in post. Heck, you even have to do some noise reduction in post when printing large from APS-C or full-frame cameras. I don't get your point about noise reduction in post shouldn't be needed at all -- it's needed for all cameras when printing large. Lightroom/ACR default settings when loading a raw image usually have some noise reduction applied, at least for color noise.

 

[Andrei V]

here is another one, a raw file zoomed in in lightroom

Is that at 100% magnification, Lee? It looks kinda grainy, but not in a way I would normally associate with digital noise (i.e. there's no random color noise that I can see, it's more.. speckled. Got any other examples? What are your noise reduction sliders set at in Lightroom?

 

[leecanning]

Hmmmm... so what size are you trying to push these too? What was the other capture settings?

lets say if i stitched together 3 shots into a pano it could be printed up around 1500x500 for example
the settings were 1/320 sec f11
yes that LR pic was 100%
no noise reduction was on at all
i wonder if the shots were suffering from slight camera wobble due to the wind? and i also wonder if my auto focus is not quite right, when i tap to focus, it zooms in but the scene doesnt seem to be in focus on the screen even if i try manual focus.
im very new to all this so excuse me
maybe this is just the way the pics are but i just wouldnt have thought on a sunny day i would get this artifacts in the image

 

[zander lane]

...try shooting at the lens' sweet spot, which I've read is around f5.0...when you stop a lens all the way down it will always suffer in resolving ability...rule of thumb is two stops down from wide open for sharpest imaging - will be going on virgin p4p flight tomorrow, must remember we have f stops to think about now as well as focusing...cool for creative focus-ey stuff, but definitely more to coordinate!

 

[Numone]

Andrei V is completely correct, and frankly I think you're expecting a bit too much. It's a small sensor and it's noisy. I can get an excellent A2 print from my Nikon D70s which has a 6MP DX sensor, but still have to manipulate in PS, as I do with pics from my D7000 and from my P3A. Frankly, I'm still amazed by the quality of the results from these tiny fixed focus cameras. One thing you could do is open the aperture up too.

 

[Andrei V]

Agree with what's been said above -- F11 is going to produce a lot of diffraction softening your image. Ideally, you want to shoot somewhere between F2.8 and F5.6. There's no real reason to have a smaller aperture when shooting stills.

Aside from that, the images you've posted don't look unusually noisy to me. When you say you intend to print at 1500x500, what units are we talking about? mm? As in, 1.5mx0.5m? If so, that's pretty big -- you're definitely going to need to do some careful post-production noise reduction. One other trick you can try if the scene is static is to take a lot of shots and average them out later in photoshop to reduce noise. This is made somewhat easier by the multi shot mode, which allows you to take up to 15 or 16 shots in quick succession. Averaging all those shots together into one should give you roughly 3 times better noise performance (basically equivalent to a full-frame sensor).