Too much noise!

I've just got back from a trip to South Africa, taking pictures with my Nikon D70. A lot of the images i've taken are very noisy in the under exposed parts of the picture, when i adjust the exposure especially when i use the white balance tool in Adobes Raw Converter. Any suggestions?

cheers

Jason

Try using a different RAW convertor (I'm not familiar with Nikon's, but on canon cameras some photos like sunbursts convert better with Canon's Digital Photo Pro or with Capture One then they do with Photoshop). You might get a better result.

A common problem for people using the CS 2 raw converter for the first time is that it defaults to auto everything. Turn off all the auto adjustments and see what you get.

I have two thoughts:

1) Are you seeing noise, or low-luminance backscatter, exposed by bringing up the brightness? If it is backscatter, then check your strobe position, or avoid the plankton in the water!

2) Are you looking at the images in "Bridge", where the browser seems to use a low-definition jpeg embedded in the file, which often looks terrible? Opening a PDF, TIFF or full-size jpeg should then look much less noisy.

I have found that playing with the "shadow/highlights" adjustment is sometimes very useful in optimising the dynamic range and avoiding problems of mismatched shadow and highlight luminance.

Tim

B)

As previously mentioned, it sounds like the auto adjustment setting is turned on and compensating too much for an under exposed image.

I've found in Camera Raw that you cannot set the exposure slider too much past 1.5+. If you do, you get that nasty noise in the underexposed regions of the image. Due to this I've found it easier to deal with a slightly over exposed image, compared to an under exposed one.

damien