Quoting aircountry (Thread starter):
I am looking for a way how to remove worst noise on very high ISO with low f number on camera and what setting do you use for night shot? I am looking similar like this..... |
All of those need a reasonable camera with low noise. For some of them, a good crop format camera might work if you know how to get the best from it. Otherwise, a 36x24mm will make it much easier.
Out of them all, the Jason Wood Qantas A380 with the lights motion blurring in the background and the Nicholas Young
EK A380 shots should be the easiest ones to deal with in terms of editing. Those at least have some brightly lit details that in my experience tend to hide noise. It is the poorly lit areas of the image that can make editing difficult.
Those John Magero shots are just spectacular.
Other way is to avoid using high ISO if possible. Use slow shutter speeds like 1/10sec or lower, that avoids the high ISO noise in the first place, and the resulting image is easier to edit. Using an F/2.8 lens makes it easier too:
The 70-200mm F/2.8 is magic for that - use ISO3200 and F/2.8. The above was hand held. There were also some airport lights to help with ambient lighting, because in reality it was far darker than that.
At the extremes, this was really late at night, in total darkness with no other light around other than the lights of the plane itself:
That was ISO3200, 1/3sec (hand held), 150mm, 6600px wide original image. I did no noise reduction on that. Camera was a Nikon D800E.
In comparison, this is with a 200-400mm Zoom Nikkor and a 1.7x
TC, at F/6.7, 550mm and ISO10,000. The shutter is 1/15sec:
It's not anywhere near as clean. The camera was a Nikon D3s. Again, no special noise reduction done on that. So take that base and compare it with what a decent "DX" (16x24mm) format camera can do. The
FX cameras are starting with a much higher standard to begin with, and even with those you can have a type of shot that is very difficult to get. Dark plane taking off, little ambient light to work with, dark background.
This was also one I wasn't happy with:
Cold, wind gusts, pouring rain, time constraints, heavy, bulky lens and trying to aim it through a tiny opening in a clear plastic barrier. ISO20,000, 210mm, F/4.5 Rain makes it more tricky, if you noise reduce that, then all the detail will be gone. The noise is really bad in the dark areas at the back, the grass, the jet base, etc.
All that said, an ISO10,000 with some reasonable ambient light gives a pretty clean image you can work on easily:
That was at about 7:50pm at night if I remember right (taken back in 2010). The version of that image that I had on a.net at the time needed very little editing, which was just as well as the noise reduction software at the time was not as good.
Your Canon 70D probably won't give you clean enough images to begin with, and your 70-300mm really needs to be an F/2.0 or F/2.8. Something like a 70-200mm F/2.8 would help you a lot, because you can use F/2.8 and not push the ISO on your camera to the levels where it gets really noisy. Along with that, you need to get good at panning shots using low shutter speeds. It's hard work. And make sure you get the exposure perfect in the camera. When you are at high ISO or otherwise photographing at night, you can't just drag the exposure slider in camera raw to make it brighter, that will expose lots of noise. You also need to try and frame the image as tightly as possible in the camera, avoid cropping the image down if at all possible. That will make getting rid of noise easier if you don't have to crop as much.
Then in Photoshop CS5, consider doing multiple layers and apply smart filters (the layer must be a smart layer to begin with) to the ones you want to apply noise reduction on, then put a mask on that layer and paint in the areas where you want noise reduction and those where you don't want it. You can use multiple noise reduction layers, each with different levels of noise reduction and using the layer mask, just paint in the noise reduction where you want it, or, alternatively, paint out the noise reduction in areas where you don't want it.
You can also take the image and copy it into a layer mask and use something like the find edges filter to help you mask in/out noise reduction. It's not perfect and you'll have to do your work - but it's a start.
It's a really long reply I know, but I'm bored today and hopefully it gives you some pointers on where to start. Looking at the images you've got on a.net already, you are pretty good already, so experiment a bit and see how you go. Perhaps you can try taking dusk photos at low shutter speeds with the camera you have, but not late at night photos when it is really dark.
I can remember ages ago one photographer who used to be on here did a fantastic shot of a Cessna Citation X at night using just a 1D Mk.III, he got it quite clean from that 10mp camera (ISO100-3200). I vaguely remember that it was low shutter speed that saved the day, because the lens was a 100-400mm Canon if I remember right. So perhaps experiment, see what you can do. If it doesn't work out, delete it and try again.
[Edited 2016-01-03 16:29:26]
), but others are absolutely correct that those wide-aperture lenses would be a huge help for low-light shooting.
I still have it, but never use it. I found it gave a very washed out/artificial look to the image. Probably exactly as Kulverstukas is suggesting.