Why are my photos grainy?

<p>I recently did a photoshoot with a family on a beautiful day, and all of their photos look grainy. I am a self-taught photographer so i'm learning both about my camera & editing as i go. I have a Nikon D40 with the 18-55mm kit lens and I use Corel Paint Shop Pro to edit my photos. I use the "noise removal" tool to help clear up the photos, but tends to make everyone look like plastic, which i don't like! I took the pictures using the portrait mode, and shot in both sunny and shaded areas, but every picture looks bad! What did i do wrong? I've done maybe 10 photo shoots previously and have never had such grainy photos. Please help! Thank you so much in advance! :)</p><div></div>

<p>This is a sharp photo given it is from a kit lens. You may improve its sharpness by local sharpening or do the same shot wiht a larger aperture (faster) lens.</p>

<p>The image, aside from being squished horizontally (which I hope was just an error on your part in uploading the wrong image to photo.net), doesn't appear particularly grainy or unsharp.</p>

<p>Have you printed this yet?</p>

<p>I resized it to post it and i'm not sure i didn't it correctly...lol, thus the squished result! No i haven't printed this yet. Maybe it's just my eyes or computer screen. The photos just don't look very clear to me and i've never seen this before. I hope they print well once they are edited! Thanks guys!</p>

<p>A couple questions as well:</p>

<p>1. How are you viewing these images? What are your criteria for determining "grainy" or sharpness? A lot of people that are new to digital photography don't fully understand what they're monitors are showing them sometimes (i.e resampling vs 100% and how that relates to prints)</p>

<p>2. Are you shooting RAW or JPG?</p>

 

<p>Brooke, other than a problem with the aspect ratio in the sample photo, I'm not seeing any problems. No excessive noise, etc. If you're seeing problems you might need to check your computer and monitor to be sure it's calibrated for photo editing.</p>

<p>At ISO 280 (per your photo's EXIF data) you won't need to use any noise reduction in post processing - there's virtually no noise to remove.</p>

<p>Save noise reduction for ISO 800 or higher. And I'm not sure how useful Corel's noise reduction utility is. The similar feature in my older version of Paint Shop Pro was somewhat useful for film grain but useless for digital noise.</p>

<p>You also need to figure out why the resized photo's aspect ratio is off. When resizing check the options to be sure you're maintaining the correct aspect ratio.</p>

<p>I view them in Corel Paint Shop Pro to edit them. I don't have criteria i guess, i'm just comparing my photos to other professional pictures i see on various photographer blogs i follow. Are you saying that maybe it's just what i'm seeing on my computer monitor and it's not how the picture really is? What i see in the pictures is that they look dotted, or maybe the pixels are stretched out. The faces don't look clear, more textured.<br>

I shoot in JPG. I don't understand the difference between RAW & JPG so i figure it's better to stay on the safe side.<br>

I hope i answered your questions! I appreciate your help!</p>

<p>How are you viewing the images to see the grain? Zooming in real tight and seeing it then? This is called "pixel peeping" and can show all kinds of bad things if you go in way too far. At normal photo viewing, do you see the grain? I don't see any.<br>

<br />And in Paint Shop Pro, when resizing images make sure one of the bottom boxes in the dialogue box says "maintain aspect ratio". If you change the numbers, you will get the squished effect shown.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Yes, to make more explicit what some others are implying--if you view these on your monitor at 100% what you see is going to look "grainy" and out of focus no matter how good the lens, etc. It's a little like you took a film picture, blew it up to 3 feet by 4 feet and then looked at it with your nose an inch from the print.</p>

<p>Were you shooting at the wide mm (18) the photo seem elongated. Stand further back from your subject and shoot at 40-50mm. Try lowering the F stop (higher number) F8, F9, F10, etc; it will give you better DOF (depth of field) and cause more of the shot to be in focus. A higher F stop (lower number) F1.4 F2.8 F3.5 will focus on the subject (children) and cause the background to be blown out; blurred, out of focus. Other then that its a pretty good photo with a kit lens. It was mentioned already, the more you crop the fuzzier the photo will become. I am not familiar with that lens; does it have VR.</p>

<p>I concur, I don't see noise in your image either. Your image was shot at ISO 280... I wouldn't even bother would noise reduction at such a low ISO on a digital SLR camera.</p>

<p>I don't see grain either, and the boy's face does seem to jump out from the background, he's in proper focus and the background is blurring, which is what you want so the main subject stands out.</p>

<p>One thing I did notice was the large catchlights in their eyes. I assume you used a largish light source (flash) coming in from the right side? The only thing I'd do next time is add a lower power flash or a reflector on the left side to brighten up the girl's side of her face a bit, around and above her right eye, or maybe you can lighten it with Corel. But I'm being critical here, it's really not as bad as I make it sound. Not bad at all.</p>

<p>[[What i see in the pictures is that they look dotted, or maybe the pixels are stretched out. The faces don't look clear, more textured.]]</p>

<p>This to me says you're not understanding how image resampling is done to fit a very large image, like your original (out-of-camera) photo to your monitor.</p>

<p>If you tell the computer to show you the full size image, which is much larger than the resolution of your monitor, the computer will use a very basic and crude algorithm to figure out how to do this. The result usually is bad at full view and 1/3 views (33%, 66%) but better at 50% or 100%</p>

<p>When you view images like this, you need to understand what your computer is actually showing you. It's not showing you the actual image, it's showing you a version of the image squished and pressed to fit your monitor. You should not make any serious quality judgments based on this. </p>

<p>The EXIF data shows no flash usage (tho' a non-system flash would probably not be recorded), but this is consistent with Brooke's website/blog statements.</p>

<p>Brooke, looking at your website and blog, you have a good eye for composition and appear to be getting good results with most portraits. Assuming you've done your own photo editing so far, whatever you're seeing now must have occurred as a result of some change in your working process. I note from your blog that you had to have your notebook computer serviced this summer. Is it possible that some changes have occurred in your computer setup since then?</p>

<p>The only problem I see is truncated feet.</p>