In 2006 I was in Santiago Chile shooting with my new-ish Nikon D200 and I found myself in the dark interior of a 400 year old church. It seemed like the ideal time to play around with the improved high-ISO capabilities of that camera. Back in the film days, I used to shoot with Fuji Velvia that I rated at ISO 40 nearly all the time. I did everything I could to avoid film grain and stepping up to an ISO 100 film was almost extreme for me. As I recall, my D100’s lowest ISO was 200 and it seemed really extravagant at the time to have all that headroom. I rarely moved off of 200, though, as the noise would creep in at 400 and especially noticeably by 800. The D200 had a lower minimum ISO of 100 and felt more in my comfort zone but there were tantalizing reports that it even gave good results at ISOs of 1600 and higher. Each successive body I’ve owned has improved even further but I still tend to stay at minimum ISOs as much as possible. Old habits I suppose, but I just don’t like the look of digital noise at higher ISOs and I like my RAW files to start out as clean as possible.

But back to that church — I didn’t have a tripod with me so I decided to experiment with higher ISOs to at least be able to capture something in that dark, candlelit interior. This shot of the candles themselves was taken at ISO 1600. It was a decent image when I processed it at the time, but there was some noise. I didn’t think much more about it until I was importing my Chile shoot into Lightroom 3 over the last couple of weeks and I decided to give the new noise reduction controls a test.

Here’s a crop at 100% of the image with noise reduction off:

And, to keep these side-by-side in the post, here’s a crop with it on (I’ll explain more after the image):

I’ll be the first to admit that this is not a true, scientific test. To be honest, I could have had a better result than that first crop four years ago if I had applied the noise reduction tools that were available at the time. What’s more, I’ve actually increased the noise issue a bit due to some exposure compensations that I’ve made in Lightroom. The idea here is just to show how much noise was in the RAW file, and how much Lightroom 3 was able to remove.

I’ve also really cranked up the noise reduction in Lightroom on the second shot. It’s more heavy-handed that I would typically use but, again, I wanted to kick the tires and see what she’d do. Luminance is maxed out at 100 in that second crop.

Is it perfect? No. There’s a bit of a painterly quality to the gradations, but it’s pretty amazing. You could continue to tweak the settings and maybe even add just a touch of LR3’s new Film Grain to disguise some of those gradation artifacts but, as a quick-and-dirty test, I’m impressed by the possibilities. I’m sure I’ll still stay in the low end of the ISO range 95% of the time, but I certainly won’t let dark conditions prevent me from shooting anymore. It’s comforting to know that even if the results aren’t great now, in four years your tools may improve to the point where you can salvage those images.

And if you’re wondering why I would add film grain after trying so hard to disguise high-ISO noise, it does seem counterproductive but it’s a technique I’ve used for years to disguise areas of retouching. Sometimes you’ll need to add a gradation to a sky or something of that nature and the retouched area looks smoother and more noiseless than the rest of the image, calling attention to your efforts. Adding a little noise or grain will unify the original image and the retouch and make everything blend. In small doses, that added grain never shows up on output. Maybe that will be the subject of a future post…