Noise

I have one of the worst low-light cameras ever made, but I absolutely love it in just about every other respect.

(Kodak DCS-760, 6mp Kodak guts in a Nikon F5 body) Because our neighbors across the street have a stellar vantage

point over Holmes Harbor, where last night's fireworks display was held, when we took a couple of folding chairs

over there I grabbed the camera and tripod for kicks.

 

The attached image shows how bad the noise was. Believe it or not, it looked about ten times worse in Lightroom

than it did in Photoshop. Now I know there are products that cut down on noise, Noise Ninja is the one that I've

seen mentioned most often. My question is, will that product (or similar) contribute much in a case this bad?

 

I don't get involved in low-light shooting professionally, but it might be worth at least some investment if

these tools make a major difference.

 

Van<div></div>

And this is cropped to the same pixels, but at full sensor resolution.<div></div>

Start out by shooting a dark frame. Put the body cap on, cover the eyepiece and take another 15 second shot at 100 ISO - preferably in similar temperature conditions as well, since noise is very temperature dependent. The dark frame should have a similar noise pattern to your actual shot. You can then subtract it from the shot using Photoshop. Then take another look to see how much noise is left. Dark frames can also be useful training aids for some NR software should dark frame subtraction prove an inadequate solution on its own. However, I wouldn't start trying to deal with the image noise in these shots without employing dark frame subtraction first.

For this specific application, you may find this software helpful:

 

http://www.tawbaware.com/imgstack.htm

Sounds like you haven't yet tried one of the noise reduction packages. Most have free trials, the one for neat image is here - http://www.neatimage.com/index.html?v69 Download it and download the profiles for the DSC760. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised as to how well it does.

i used noise noise ninja on the full sized version. the analisis came back from NN at 29. this is noisy but slightly. it is NOT a truely noisy image. the items in the resized image could be debris and smoke from previous fireworks bursts. i used NN, auto levels(pe6), and focus magic on the image.<div></div>