What is noise in photography?

What is noise in photography? Today I give a brief explanation about noise and when you might get it in your photographs.

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Mike

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[miguelhodge]

Great explanation! I’m new to the photography world and looking to learn something new everyday, you delivered that for me today!

[stephenwoodburn]

This is something that took me some experimentation with a while back. For a while, I was underexposing everything and didn't understand why parts of my image had what appeared to be noise to me when recovering in Lightroom. Now I try to nail my exposure a little better, even if that means coming off of 100 ISO. I feel like I have cleaner images. Just because you can underexpose and recover, doesn't mean you always should. That was my takeaway. Thanks for the reminder, Mike.

[earavichandran]

Explained clearly about noise. Great video.

[michaelwhite]

Great video. I'll be showing this to my daughter!

[onikaimu]

Wonderfully made video. Clearly illustrated with complete understanding. Thank you for the bonus video.

[HenryPhung]

So informative. Absolutely love it. Thank you.

[DanHeginbotham]

As always, clear and concise explanation. I really enjoy the weekly (or in this case twice a week) tips so please keep them coming! Do you think you could do a tutorial on the different options within a picture profile on the Sony a7iii. I know you have covered which settings you choose, but I would love to understand what the reasoning is behind selecting the different options (e.g. knee, gamma, colour mode).

[johncotter]

Straightforward, clear and helpful, thanks Mike. I've been trying to print some birdy pics I took with high ISO and high shutter speed to freeze movements. They have noise but look OK on screen. However, when I print them they come out too dark with under-saturated colour. The printer has managed to make decent versions of other pics, just not these today. I'm suspecting that the noise has caused the dark prints. I was able to reduce the noise in my photo editor but sharpness was lost so I left most of it in. At the other end of the scale, I've had very low-pixel-count prints coming out with a white wash all over suggesting that the printer (a Canon G660) prints white dots where there are no pixels. Is this the real problem with noise - bad prints?

[Tinfoilnation]

Cheers Mike! You mentioned it, but I'm going to pile in on top and repeat it. In the fight against noise you should really consider doing an entire video on the importance of getting the exposure right in the first place. I do primarily wildlife photography and live in the Pacific Northwet (Seattle, US) where it's overcast ~8+ months of the year. Low light and high shutter speeds do not play well. When I started I made the boneheaded, dumb mistake of " *I'll keep my ISO low to avoid noise!* " -- which predictably lead to thousands of completely unusable, underexposed shots with *terrible* noise despite having low-ish ISO. I used to believe anything above ISO 1000 would just be waste of time because of the noise - which is totally untrue. It took the longest time for me to make the connection between proper exposure and noise levels (I can be pretty dumb when I set my mind to it) Once I did make the connection though I stopped living in fear of high ISO and instead became terrified of underexposing my shots. Learn to love the histogram, push your exposures to the right, and high ISO noise becomes almost trivial to handle in post. I've got shots now with ISO levels above 10k that are entirely usable. There's noise in them of course, but so long as the exposure is correct that noise is entirely manageable in post... something I thought was damn near *impossible*

[paololarocca]

Nice video, Mike. One question: in situations with a high dynamic range, like a landscape with a white sky or a room with a white window, what do you do? Do you spot-expose for the highlights, accepting the trade- off of some noise when you recover the shadows, or do you matrix-expose, accepting patches of blown-out highlights? Or do you always bracket the exposure in these situations and combine them in post-production? From my experience if you don't want to take multiple exposures it's probably better to expose for the highlights, and then maybe use exposure compensation for just underexposing them of 1/3 of a stop, what do you think?

[chryseass.]

Nice and clear explanation, Mike ( no pun intended!) Ha, ha - thanks for justifying my recent purchase of the Sony 24 f1.4 GM lens. Yes, I have been trying it out on night shots in the city! I am experimenting with manually dialling in ISO instead of having it on Auto for cleaner images.

[iVilliain]

I wonder when AI will get amazing at predicting and eliminating/ minimizing noise. I think if we can take 720p signals and bump them to 4K pretty reliably, i bet similar scenarios could drastically reduce noise. I'm so excited for the future!

[paulvo]

Nice informative video.
Do you know how ISO noise is measured by camera manufacturers? Is the ISO objectively measured?
Thank you.

[PaavanShenoy]

THANK you so much for this video and please make a video on smartphone photo . all things covered like, what is the underexposed photo and everything in the smartphone camera and photos. please. BY THE WAY. YOU GOT A SUBSCRIBER HERE :)

[paulm]

👍Super high “signal to noise” ratio in vid content, Mike!😁 Great image “so what factor” examples, and TV static meme (nice effect). Wonder how many viewers recall those sets. (AM radio “static” is another analogy I hear sometimes, where cam electronics and natural background RF signals are picked up by sensor.) Would noise reduction techniques apply equally to “color noise” in a photo, or is that something different?

[Cynth]

To be honest when an image gets pixely up close I like the noise

[Jejakedit]

So if my image looks normal when not zoom in, but after i really zoom in there is lot grain is that still count noise?

[alphatango]

My images are full of noise even with Sony a7iii