Glowstick Girl. Absolutely pushing the limits of the D810 sesnor and fast aperture prime lens, the 50mm f/1.4G nikkor in ultra low light. ISO 12800, 1/40, f/1.4.
Introduction
Noise in images seems to create a huge panic amongst photographers these days, and I honestly do not know why this is. For a long time I have mostly preferred very low levels of noise reduction, or none at all in images I produce. I dislike the plasticy look that even advanced AI noise reduction programs achieve if pushed too far; and most of the time it just does not look natural to my eyes. I have some exceptions to this rule, for example in deep sky astrophotography work where I use it a little bit more due to the overall process involved; it almost feels more necessary, as it is normal practice to photograph extremely faint deep sky objects and stack many hours of images together to make the final image.
What I seem to see in forums and in discussions, is that this by product of producing a still image is so ugly that it must be removed, and in many cases, totally removed in that we get smudged, lifeless backgrounds of noiseless strata. I think that there are plenty of camera’s out there that produce a very organic, dare I say it, film like grain that doesn’t distract from the image, and at time’s that itself might even enhance it’s “realness” depending on the situation. We should remember most noise is hidden unless coasting 100% views of the image which no one does except us. The forerunning image in this article mostly captures my thoughts on noise. Leave it in. I’ll normally use it at a setting between 15-25, depending on the picture. This forerunning picture was set to 20, a reasonable setting for this extreme condition. Many would go much further with noise reduction. We would push it further, then the face becomes very plasticy looking, as do the PJ’s. We could take that even further, and mask out the face / body and just hit the background with NR; but then we get a real disconnect between the background and the subject. If I occasionally do this, I do it very gently so it is not picked up (like all good edits should be). This picture is a very extreme example. Most pictures do not require this level of touch up to obtain a great result. The advice I am going to impart in this article will keep your noise to an absolute maximum, allowing you to make great pictures even in ultra low light conditions with a little bit of know-how and practice.
Nikon D810, ISO 400 at f/1.4 and 1/125
Close up showing Noise (Pinch zoom if on mobile)
In this first example, I have used no noise reduction; because it simply isn’t warranted. Better to have details than smudges. Using good shot discipline, as I have done here, allows me to avoid any noise reduction in this case. You can see why I love shooting with the Nikon D810, despite still owning the newer mirrorless cameras. It’s sensor produces a very film like grain at moderate to high ISOs (400-6400 ish). There is no way I’d want to rid this from the image. Be aware, it is difficult to show the exact grain without doing a 100% crop - this isn’t one because it ends up being too small.
Settings
You will notice that in for example, Lightroom, (ie camera RAW in Photoshop) that there are some settings in the noise reduction panel to be aware of. There are sliders for the amount of total global noise reduction, and specific slides for luma noise, and colour noise with sliders to aid their application. For luma noise, I tend to use zero for most work, especially daylight landscapes. Even portraiture, I use very little or any, even if we are speaking about higher ISO portraiture in low light (of course with some directional light too hopefully).
I tend to ensure that colour noise is between 5-35 (this varies image to image); too high a level smudges any singular colour backgrounds together and leaves artefacts which are quite ugly in nature (that plasticy look again). They are very easy to spot in defocused backgrounds with fast lenses. Too low a setting and individual RGB pixels are seen which can really take away from the background of the image. Test this out for yourself and you will see what I mean. You’ll get better results than just leaving it at the default of 25 all the time.
Pinball Kid
In this example my son is playing his pinball machine and was too warm - deciding to go topless. An unusual, but humorous picture nonetheless, I always have a camera about in the house. This image was processed in Lightroom to reveal the massive dynamic range, and pull out the scene so it looks like what my eyes saw. When first assessing the RAW file, I could see very little into the shadows. The reason the file looks like this as it is presented in a linear looking form and has no curve or contrast adjustments applied to it yet. It was very simple to adjust the curve and shadows to bring out the D810’s beautiful dynamic range. Care must be taken to not just pull sliders about without reason, adding +100 to shadows will really bring out noise in situations like these and will worsen the image globally, reducing contrast and at times giving a horrible muddy, HDR look to the resulting picture. We don’t want that. What we want to do is produce a picture like what our eyes saw. Here are the majority of the settings applied to this RAW file, a relatively simple edit in this case:
The reason I have had to boost by +1.6 on exposure; is because I shot at the dual gain point of the D810’s sensor to maximise it’s dynamic range. The rest of the settings are self explainatory. Notice the slight upward curve point applied at the right of the leftmost hump. This increases midtone contrast and brightness. I have faded off the end of the blacks slightly to soften the image in the deepest tones, indicated by the applied leftmost point. I did a very basic singular mask on his face and highlights of his body and that was it.
Noise Reduction Settings
For this file, I left the settings at my default of 25 for colour NR. any lower, and bright R G B specs could be see in the darkest areas (like the vignette in the corners and the low lying exposure zones). Too high a setting, 35-55 for example, and the green background smudges into a horrible plastic one toned blob, we don’t want that, it’s not a good look. Yes I could clean further with the AI addition in LR, or elsewhere, but I left it in this time (it looks bad here bceause it is super magnified). You can see I haven’t applied any luminance here bccause in this particular example, doing so dropped the detail in the scene to levels I did not like. AI NR used sparingly, can work however as I will show later on in this article.
100% Crop
100% crop. NB focal plane on eyes outwith shot
This is the natural noise “grain” from the sensor, and I like to keep it real. If you have ever printed an image, you would know that noise just doesn’t really show up much. My advice to most shooters is to drop the time wasted on noise reduction and focus on something more worthwhile with the above simple caveats, and consider that yes, for deep sky astro work, things are a little different. Remember, that your mileage may vary. Whilst I feel that cleaning up too much of a file and making it too perfect destroys the realism, especially there are several factors that influence that - for example removing a rock in a landscape etc, you may not. Where does it stop? For every shooter, there will be a different place where they consider the edit has gone too far. As long as you are happy with your result and progess as an editor, you are on the right track.
NB - Please be aware that it is difficult to show you exactly what these files look like here. Image compression applied by the website tech can product some artefacting and blockiness can appear in deep blacks, not present in the end result on my monitor.
Extreme Low Light with the D810
Let’s look at an image that I made in November 2024 of my son in the back of the car on his tablet computer playing games. I shot this at too low of an ISO - 400. Despite the D810 being pretty invariant, I should have shot it up at 3200-6400 to get less amp glow and magenta cast on the right which I fixed in post. To my eye, this was much darker. All I could see was a tiny glow on his face, and the light from the tablet. The surroundings of the scene - the car door, and the window above with the glint of a car’s tail lights was barely made out by my vision, showing how incredible these cameras actually are for a fast shutter speed shot. This above image is the result of AI noise reduction in Lightroom. I used a setting of ‘25’ for it. This shot was boosted 4 stops in post! I can do this because as mentioned, the D810 is mostly invariant when doing so, however even if I shot at ISO 3200 etc, there is so little light that there would be very similar amounts of noise. This is when I will use moderate amounts of AI noise reduction, or sometimes a combination of Lightroom’s manual NR, and then AI NR.
Adobe AI Denoise
This is my preferred method of NR, being a Lightroom / Photoshop editor. It keeps this process in the family, and only takes a few seconds to do, and it also means I don’t have to waste money on other dedicated programs. However, for a while I kept getting blue / purple colour casts when using this powerful technique. I found out after some digging that it was nothing to do with graphics cards or out of date drivers in my case. I found out, that it needs to be applied first, or at the very least, before any masking is applied. You see, Denoise AI looks at the pure RAW data, and disregards any edits you have made to the raw file. It then calculates the setting you input, and then places those further edits you made, back over the file after it completes. If you have used complex masks and the like, it seems to be that the calculations get messed up and we sometimes experience strangeness such as the colour casts I was seeing. Since experimenting, I no longer have this problem. Sometimes it is useful to create a virtual copy of the file in lightroom. Do your edits on the initial RAW file, and see how much NR you will need. To the virtual copy undo all edits, then apply the NR, and simply sync the edits from the original RAW file over to it after it completes. This way, I never get casts and I will admit to it being a very powerful technique, when used with care.
Final Thought
Do not be like everyone else in this game who obsesses over noise in photographs. It’s the worst trait of photographers today. (Apart from those dudes that show up at dark sky sites when I have been there all night, lighting stuff up with torches!). Consider how much NR you need and apply it tastefully. I highly recommend Adobe Denoise AI in lowered amounts. Think about the scene. Let’s make it feel like film, and less like digital. For the most part, it’ll turn out whole lot better than the plasticy look I see everywhere now…