Inexplicable Noise - Can anyone help

[nzphil]

<p>Hi All,</p>

<p>I took this photo from a plane as it passed over coastline. Camera is Sony A900 with Zeiss 24-70 Lens<br>

Shutter 350, Aperture f8, 24mm, ISO 200. The camera was pressed against cabin window and I made efforts to reduce glare/reflections from cabin lights.</p>

<p>I really like the photo and would like to crop/straighten etc and print reasonably large however as you can see it is very noisy.</p>

<p>Does anyone know why so noisy (for future reference) and if it can be fixed at this stage.</p>

<p>Thanks in advance</p><div></div>

[samuel_lipoff]

<p>This doesn't seem so inexplicable --- it looks like pretty straight forward underexposure, and thus resulting noise in the shadow areas. I don't normally use Adobe Lightroom as my RAW converter, but I downloaded the trial of LR3 and was very impressed by the noise reduction algorithm in that program. Even if this was taken as a JPEG only, I'd have a go with a good noise reduction program and see what can be done. I find sunrise and sunset to be tricky --- certainly the camera's meter can be fooled pretty easily. To be safe, bracket your exposure.</p>

[thomas_lozinski]

<p>It looks like you really boosted the saturation (either in camera or in raw processor)<br>

If you do this in raw watch your histogram, you'll start to get clipping of individual colors which will look like raw. To fix this one trick I use is to add a motion blur to the sky only at 90 degrees (horizontal.) Looks like you also have a spot of dust on your sensor. See attached photo with motion blurred sky and some noise reduction.</p><div></div>

[heri_rakotomalala]

<p>Thomas, with the motion blur, it looks like a screenshot from "Flight Simulator X". <br>

As for the noise... I would have taken the picture at f4 or at most f5.6 to get more light. Also at ISO 100, there would have been less noise.</p>

[Tim_Lookingbill]

<p>The image posted is too small for me to see any noise.</p>

<p>Just FYI digital camera sensors are photon (particles within the spectrum of light) counters. If there's very little light then there's very few photons to count and all that's left is noise.</p>

<p>Making the image over saturated and contrasty either with incamera settings or in post <br />will amplify this noise.</p>