Hi OSP Folks.

Forgive me, I hope this isn't too stupid of a question.

Every now and then I process my images and come up with grain or noise on pictures that I'm assuming I shouldn't have noise in.

I almost exclusively use lightroom. I shoot with a 20D and one of the pictures that I'm referring to was shot in the late afternoon at ISO 400 at 1/200th of a second. I didn't use my flash so I tried to bump up some fill light to bring up the light in the face. I don't think I bumped my exposure too much. It's a jpeg file to begin with.

Can y'all "educate" me on something I might be doing to introduce grain? I know that at 400, that the 20D is more than capable of producing silky smooth stuff.

Thanks for the help,
Jake

It's pretty simple. If you increase the exposure in post, you add more noise. If you are bringing up the shadows, it will be worse than the midtones. Also, jpg will show the difference more than RAW.

Underexposing creates grain, even at 100 ISO. The more you have to "bump up some fill light" the more noise you're going to get.

Karen

Thanks Corey and Karen.

So basically, I should just nail the exposure.

Thanks for your help.
Jake

Yup... but this is a good thing: with everyone having a digital SLR nowadays, nailing the exposure is just one more thing that sets you apart from Uncle Bob.

If you can keep the highlights in check, slightly overexposing and pulling it down seems to work really well with the canons. (We use the 20D and 40D)

RAW really gives you a bit of buffer room there, about 1/2 stop on the 20D, almost a full stop on the 40D. DPP has NR built in, but it does come at the expense of a bit of detail and sharpness.

Hope this helps!

Shan