You see this camera is usable at this ISO. There is a little noise in the dark blue sky but pretty nice. Amazing how far this has come, the image is better than film at ISO 800. Now for some 100% comparisons. This is Capture default conversion
Pretty amazing if you ask me. The noise is very grain like as if it is film.
Now Lightroom. Left, default Lightroom conversion, right optimized noise reduction (about 50/50 in both luminance and chroma)
As you see, Lightroom's conversion is far noisier by default and it is typical digital noise. The more optimized conversion is still noisy and becomes splotchy. Not very good. You also see strange speckling around the lights in both images that is not present in the Capture conversion.
Conclusion: Not surprising since the software comes from the camera maker, Capture NX deals very well with high ISO noise. If only the program were not so horrible in its use that I dread opening it every time, I would use it all the time and import tiffs or jpegs into Lightroom from it.
EDIT: because of a request below, I added the Mac OS X (i.e. identical to Aperture - my trial license for Ap 2 expired) default system RAW library conversion. It looks like this:
Very similar to Lightroom default version but not as good as Capture NX's. Somehow the noise seems to be a little more even than in the Lightroom conversion, so perhaps it would be easier to deal with, but I digress.
Did you really need 50 on the color noise reduction? I've found that the usable range is usually between 1 and 10, with little to no beneficial effects beyond that. Luminance, on the other hand, sometimes needs to be bumped up quite a bit.
ReplyDeleteLR often gets criticized for its lack of really good noise reduction. What it has is just fine for most shots, but it's certainly no Noise Ninja.
Need is a big word here. I bumped up luminance first and was not really happy with it as there was quite a bit of colored noise left, so I bumped up the color noise reduction to from its default at 25 (what 25 means is different for every camera). Only at 50 did I start to loose the obvious colored noise you see in the default settings image. Point is that even with these extreme settings, Lightroom was still nowhere near Capture NX in its default settings showing that Nikon at least gets one thing right. My post was not really meant as an indictment of Lightroom as I know the noise reduction is not the best.
ReplyDeleteInteresting post. I will have to compare some of my noisy shots like you did here. I didn't think there would be a big difference in the files when they were opened up and had no noise reduction yet.
ReplyDeleteJust wanted to follow up. Indeed, ISO 1600 photos imported into both Capture and Lightroom did show a remarkable difference in noise quality. It seems to be an entirely different way of handling the noise between the two apps. I often see artifacts in noisy images inside Lightroom and now I know why. I wonder if they will improve it for Lightroom 2?
ReplyDeleteThanks Jon. The two images above were done in Lightroom 2.0 beta. They are basically identical to what I get in Lightroom 1.4.1, so it does not really look like it. You never know though.
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ReplyDeleteI know that you complained about Apertures RAW conversions before. Have you looked at Aperture 2.x in relation to these two?
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comparison information. I've been looking at the CDs that came with my D300, and have been wondering what to do with them. Capture NX is getting installed tonight!
ReplyDeleteAperture by itself is very similar to Lightroom with these images. The noise in the default conversion is slightly more colored. I am guessing you could clean it up, but probably nothing approaching the Capture conversion. Probably a tool like noise Ninja would do much better.
ReplyDeleteThat matches up with my findings as well. :)
ReplyDeleteIf you use CaptureNX to do the original interpretation of the RAW data, how would it fit into a Lightroom/Aperture workflow? Do you use CaptureNX to pull from the camera? Can you then use those RAW files in Lightroom/Aperture, or do you need to export them in a different format?
ReplyDeleteChris,
ReplyDeleteit doesn't really fit. Nikon;s tools to download images are rather crappy. Lightroom does a far better job at downloading, organizing, tagging, etc. What I have to do if I want to use Capture on an image is to right (or control) click on the image in Lightroom, choose show in Finder (explorer on windows), open the RAW file it will show in Finder directly in Capture, do my edits, save as a tiff file in the same folder and then sync the folder in Lightroom. Luckily this happens only rarely as Lightroom in general does fine. Only when I shoot at excessive ISO or when I cannot get the colors like I want in Lightroom (also rare) will I go to Capture. Nikon's tools by themselves really do not enable a good workflow at all.
Wow, that's awkward. Doesn't sound like enough of a benefit for me right now to spend money on it. They don't throw it in with a D40 ;-) Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI haven't tested, but I assume adobe photoshop's RAW import handles the noise the same way lightroom does?
ReplyDeleteYes, Photoshop uses the exact same processing pipeline (i.e. camera RAW) as Lightroom. The results should be identical.
ReplyDeleteCan you upload your nef File?
ReplyDeleteI want try Noise Ninja.
Thank you.
you upload your nef File.
ReplyDeleteI want try Noise Ninja.
Thank you.