Friday, September 23, 2011

Foliage at ISO 1600

Here is yet another comparison pair, RAW+JPEG, taken with LX5 firmware 2.0, with high ISO noise reduction. The RAW version was processed from Aperture with Topaz DeNoise and then stamped with my standard RAW preset, which tries to approximate the JPEGs I get from the LX5 using the nostalgic film mode. Which is which?

As Andreas noted, foliage is rather challenging for noise reduction algorithms. This was a case where the result is borderline usable, at least with RAW.

2 comments:

Andreas said...

#1 is RAW+Topaz, but I guess it's too much of it. Maybe two layers with Topaz, one blended for the highlights, one for the shadows, would do the trick. But then, maybe not :D

Juha Haataja said...

@Andreas: Maybe not ... I also took at ISO 1600 some photographs of grainy wood surfaces and wet sand/gravel - they were all past saving, nothing to be done.