Photography and the Art of Seeing

 DxO PhotoLab is available at www.dxo.com Wow. Look at the digital noise in this image. Both the luminance and colour noise are so pronounced you could probably feel it if you ran your hand across this print. This image was taken back 2013 in the evening on a poorly lit football field at ISO 12,800. The noise reduction software we had at the time was relatively good back in those days but once I enlarged it .... well you know where I am going with this. This image is cropped quite a bit and ended up about 5.3 inches square. Good enough for social media but not so good for enlargements so I decided to disguise the flaws in the image by adding a painterly filter effect to it. That actually looked quite good as a 16 inch square print. Quite the conversation piece. The technical specs are: Nikon D3 (12 MegaPixel sensor), Nikkor 70-200mm f2.8 VRII lens shot at 1/500th second at f2.8 using ISO of 12,800. I am sure that the newer cameras on the market today would produce better quality im...

DxO PhotoLab's Deep Prime noise reduction is simply amazing at getting rid of unwanted noise in your images to say the least. Don't get me wrong; I do like the look of film grain in some images and leaving some of the digital noise in our images is perfectly fine but I believe there is a better way to achieve that look than what some or most software does with the click of a button or moving a slider one way or another. I'll leave that for another post . For this article I will be using an image shot on a Nikon D500 using a Nikon 105mm f2.8 lens. The technical specs are as follows; ISO 4000, 1/640 sec at f2.8. There are two things about crop sensor cameras; one good and the other, not so good but not terribly bad either. Crop sensor cameras can get in closer to your subject due to the nature of the crop - this is the good thing. The not so good thing is these sensors tend to product more visible noise in our images. More on the pros & cons of crop vs full-frame sensors ...