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M9 higher ISO in practise


Mokkacream

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M9, 50 f/1.4, ISO 800, handhold, AutoWB, LR 2.5, Chromasoft M9 profile, no further processing

 

# 2+3 100% crop

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M9, 50 f/1.4, ISO 1600, handhold, AutoWB, LR 2.5, Chromasoft M9 profile, no further processing

 

# 2+3 100% crop

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M9, 50 f/1.4, ISO 1250, handhold, AutoWB, LR 2.5, Chromasoft M9 profile, Automatic WB, no further processing

 

with 100% crops

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To me it appears, that High ISO Noise (HIN) ...

 

1) is very well controlled in black and very dark parts

2) is almost not visible in very light parts

3) is most prominent in the range between

 

To me, the noise of the Leica M9 keeps almost always being a kind of beautiful, not disturbing. It reminds me on the grain of film emulsions. It doesn't look like an electronic device noise, that we saw with the very first digital cameras, at all.

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The problem with high ISO shots is the light conditions of the scene in these cases.

 

The light isn't good, usually.

 

The image quality deteriorates due to increase in ISO, but also due to warm lights. So we have two causes of image degradation operating at the same time. This affects sharpness, color reproduction, etc.

 

It is very difficult to evaluate high ISO image quality under poor light conditions.

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Rosuna you are quite correct. Add to that the increase of importance of 'correct exposure' with increase of ISO and I think we then have the 'hat trick' of handling hi iso.

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One problem with high ISO noise is that it is so often the result of shooting indoors, by a low level of tungsten light. A white balance is then required, which brings up the blue channel so much that the noise in the blue channel is boosted significantly.

 

The second set of images above gets around this by not doing a white balance, but as a result has a strong yellow cast. What does it look like when it is corrected?

 

The EU laws have apparently just made traditional glowing filament light bulbs illegal, so I suppose by the time existing stocks have been exhausted, the old yellow light problem will have changed to something different. Does anyone know how digital cameras handle energy saver bulbs, and what the spectrum of such a bulb is like?

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The real problem with fluorescent bulbs is that they don't have continuous black body type spectrums. Bulbs with higher CRI (90+) ratings are close enough to the real thing to not cause a problem, but there are a lot of bulbs out there with crummy ratings, which result in that nice green cast. I've never seen a CRI rating on the compact fluorescent lights either, so I don't know the variance in those.

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{snipped}

 

The second set of images above gets around this by not doing a white balance, but as a result has a strong yellow cast. What does it look like when it is corrected?

{snipped}

 

Carsten, just dl one of the 100% crops with that "gray" specular. Drop into PS and use a levels layer, and put the gray dropper on the specular. Now you have a worst-case JPEG adjustment at 100% (and probably cooler than you'd like, judging by skin).

 

There's still a half-stop underexposure, but from what I see, the results are extremely promising :)

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High ISO and the M9 is not an issue at all. I shot some test shots around my house last night at ISO 2500 and 1.4. Noise was a non issue, even with straight out of camera shots taken under indoor light. Posted them on my site...

 

MY ONGOING LEICA M9 DIARY - OCTOBER 2009

 

Again, just silly test shots but if I did that with the M8 it would be a different story. The samples posted in this thread look great. I shot some stuff last week for a client and two of my shots were at ISO 2000 and they looked great printed without any perceivable noise.

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The noise (grainy look) isn't a problem for me either...the problem is the lack of sharpness, tonal variation and gradation, dynamic range and color gamut.

 

The M8 responds badly under adverse low light conditions: severe losses in image quality. A "correct" exposure" isn't enough. It is the bad tungsten light the main cause.

 

CMOS based cameras also suffer under these light conditions, badly.

 

There aren't magic recipes for this... more noise reduction (false signal) helps, but the filtered (Bayer) nature of the digital sensors is the main cause, besides the signal to noise ratio...

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I've been asked to photograph at an event and have been warned that the hotel lighting is a mixture of tungsten and low energy fluorescent. Some rooms have one or the other and some a mixture. Before I travel I've been very quickly trying out M9 profiles built using the Colorchecker Passport. One good thing is you can build "dual illuminant" profiles that cater for illumination from mixed sources eg. tungsten/fluorescent. So far the results using a Gretag Macbeth color chart as a test subject have been very encouraging :). I'll be taking the Passport with me so I can generate profiles specific to a room's lighting.

 

Bob.

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Interesting. It seems likely then that the new EU regulations will improve high ISO photos :)

 

...or, if these "Green" energy-saver bulbs cause green color casts, inspire a Renaissance of black and white photography. :D

 

--Peter

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