NOISE - What is it? Reduce it! Remove it! Easy To Follow Advice For Wildlife Photography

g'day and welcome to the channel and today's video we're going to chat about noise and your wildlife images I'm gonna explain what noise is what causes it how to reduce it in the field and how to remove it and post processing and layman's terms noise is the grain that you see in an image this noise can often lead to lower image quality let's take a close look at this yellow-throated scrub rim can you see all of the grain and the background can you see how it impacts the quality of the image ideally what we want to avoid is images that just have too much noise and it distracts the viewer from the bird how much is too much noise well if it's noticeably visible and off-putting then I'd say it's too much but luckily for us we can actually reduce a lot of the snows in post-processing with noise reduction software so noise isn't as big of a problem as a lot of people think it is I know a lot of people have issues with noise and that's why I'm making this video but I just want to assure you by the end of this video you should be very comfortable with knowing how to deal with noise and how to remove it and hopefully it's not an issue for you moving forward so all images will have an amount of noise in them and that's perfectly fine you don't have to have a noise free image for it to be good so I'm sure you've probably noticed noise in your images and you've probably wondered why some images have more noise than others and why is that so to answer that question the four main factors that influence noise as your light is your ISO and your exposure the type of camera you're using and how much you crop an image let's look at those four things in more detail alright let's chat about light I actually think the brightness of the scene you're about to photograph ultimately dictates how much noise you have that is the darker the scene the less light you have available and that will lead to more noise it's a really important concept that you have to understand is that whenever you're about to take a photo you only have a certain amount of light available to take that photo so if you're in a dark rain forest you're not going to have a lot of light and without sufficient light you generally need to bump up your ISO just to get some shutter speed and that will introduce noise if you're in a really bright scene such at the beach you have abundant light so you're able to use really high shutter speeds and low higher so so it's this brightness of the scene which ultimately dictates the camera settings that you can use I'm talking about your aperture your shutter speed and your higher so there's a thing called light value which assigns a number to how much light you have available and it goes on a scale from 5 to 16 if I've been really dark and 16 being really bright every photo you take will go between that 5 or the 16 this light value dictates the settings that you can use so let's have a look at this diagram I've created this relates to the probability of getting noise in your images let's start on the left you're most likely to get noise in your images when you have a very dark scene such as in the rainforest or with heavy cloud these scenarios typically have a light value of between 5 and 9 which means you will likely be using very high ISOs such as 3200 to save and 12,800 it's almost impossible to avoid noise in these situations and the amount will vary depending on some factors that I'll discuss in this video here's an example of an image taken in this scenario it's a satin bowerbird taken with a light value of 5 point 3 3 which is very low I actually ended up using a very low shutter speed of 140th of a second which gave me an ISO of 3200 we have a look at 100% crop of the raw image you can see how much noise is in this image it's actually not that bad and after processing and you can't really even notice it I really should have upped the ISO here to 6400 to give me a shutter speed of 180 eighth of a second you'll find with these dark scenes is you're going to be it's going to be a balance between shutter speed and ISO and you'll have to make that decision so if you have lower shutter speeds you're gonna have less noise because your ISO can be lower but if you want higher shutter speeds you're gonna have a little bit more noise but it really is a balance isn't it let's look at the diagram again and in the middle the medium charts of getting noise this is kind of the light value between 9 and 13 and you're using ISOs generally between eight hundred and thirty two hundred so noise is visible but it's definitely manageable not really an issue so here's an example of a Black Swan even though we did actually have a little bit of sunlight the bird is black or dark the background was slightly dark and this has caused us to have a slightly lower light value of eleven point six seven so actually took this a nice over 1,600 and when we look at the raw file the noise is barely noticeable so these light values is not really an issue so on the right hand side when you've got a bright scene and you're using ISO s as low as 200 to 800 noise really isn't an issue and this is when you've got direct sunlight you've basically got ample light to get your shutter speeds in a low ISO here's an image of a white faced heron this has a light value of fourteen point six seven so very high and I actually used in ISO as low as 200 as you can see from the hundred percent crop is literally very little noise so pretty easily if you look at that diagram and you shoot in the sort of medium and bright areas you're never really going to have much of an issue with noise it's only when you're shooting in a dark scene that you're going to have issues and you've probably knew that already so you know sometimes you don't have a choice if you're in a rain forest you're in a rain forest but other times you know you do have a choice I often shoot a natural light or when the sun's out because it gives me enough light to take the images that I want to take and maybe that's an option for you if you're having issues with your noise that brings us to a very interesting tip I have you and that is the darker that your background is the more noise they'll be so if you're taking a photo just be aware of the color of your background if you can have a lighter colored background it will result in less noise here's an image of a white faced heron as you can see the majority image is quite dark and it does have quite a bit of noise but at the bottom of the image you can see this sort of blue water and it's quite a bit brighter if we zoom in on the dark part and this bright part you can see that there's a difference in noise this is the same exposure the same camera the same photo but different noise levels depending on the color of the background so you can use this to your advantage if you're doing setups or you can control your environment being aware of the color or brightness of your background can help you to reduce the noise and I do this with my setups you've seen a lot of my photos the background is quite light and that's I can have less noise and you can see in this image here of these wood swallows we've got very little noise in this bright background okay it's time to chat about your ISO sitting and how that impacts noise you've probably heard me use the term ISO numerous times in all my videos and if you don't quite understand what it is I'm gonna try and explain it to you you could google ISO but you'll get some technical explanation I'm gonna try and make it as simple as possible your ISO setting basically increases the brightness of the image that you see on the back of your screen by increasing your ISO the camera needs less light to expose the photo so a higher ISO means that your scene will be brighter it's that simple let's have a look at the back of the camera so I can show you this in action okay let's see how ISO impacts the amount of light that the camera needs to expose a photo so on the back of the camera at the moment we've got a shuttle speed of 50th of a second so I'm actually set up for video so that's quite low and we've got the base I serve 100 so the highest quality we can possibly get so I'm currently filming just a bush scene and with these settings it gives us a light value of about nine point three three so sort of about a medium darkness it's actually pretty foggy at the moment so we are lacking direct sunlight now let's say I wanted to shoot birds and I wanted this shutter speed to go up to eight hundredths of a second so so at eight hundredths of a second we're gonna be able to freeze the action and get nice sharp shots so if I adjust that if I think alright I just want to update the shutter speed so if I take this look what's happening to the histogram and how dark the scene is becoming so if I take this all the way to eight hundredths of a second the scene is almost completely black and if I should take a photo that's what we would get it would be heavily underexposed and we obviously couldn't see anything and that's not what we want so for us to be able to get a brighter scene we want to up our ISO so by upping that ISO the camera needs less light to expose the photo so if I go up to 200 let's see what happens okay so it's a touch brighter but not a lot so we need to keep upping this ISO okay it's getting brighter it's getting brighter still and alright at ISO 1600 this brings us back to the same brightness we had before so two different lots of settings but exactly the same exposure or brightness so these settings I could quite easily take a photo of a bird eight hundredths of a second and ISO 1600 Serge you can see as we update ISO the camera needs less light and it obviously brightens the scene if we were to continue pushing that ISO up you can see how the screen just continues to get brighter and brighter I think that demonstration easily showed you that by increasing your ISO you're brightening the screen I've got another diagram here which shows you how when you increase your ISO you can increase your shutter speed and as you can see at a base of 100 we had a shutter speed of 125th of a second and as you increase your ISO by stop so 100 to 200 you increase your shutter speed by stop from 125th to one 250th and so on and so on and so on and that's basically all your ISO is doing is just giving you a brighter scene and giving you more light to play with and this is a really important relationship when it comes to setting exposure for wildlife if you increase your ISO you get higher shutter speeds it's pretty simple but there are some trade-offs as you increase your ISO you're also decreasing your image quality so you can think of that ISO is an image quality gauge as well higher their ISO lower the quality when I say lower quality all I mean is that there's more grain in your images it's not quite as sharp and lacks feather detail so you have to have a balance you can't just put the ISO to its maximum and expect to get good quality shots there's a trade-off and that is ultimately up to you as to what you're comfortable doing with what ISO setting you're going to so a very important point I need to make is that the ISO number that you set or the setting does not directly correlate to the amount of noise in your image I know that's confusing but have a look at the screen we've got two images here both shot at ISO 1600 but one has significantly more noise than the other why is that shouldn't they be the same that both got the same ISO setting well the top image the noisy one if you can see that the shutter speed is actually quite a lot it's actually one four hundredth of a second we have a look at the raw file for that we can see that it's heavily underexposed it's actually underexposed by three stops so it's a lot darker now if we correct that and post we have to increase the exposure by three stops to bring it to the same brightness level as the previous image now cuz we've increased it by three stops we have to increase that ISO by three stops so it goes sixteen hundred thirty two hundred sixty-four hundred twelve thousand eight hundred so to get the correct exposure at four hundred a second we're actually using an ISO of twelve thousand eight hundred and that explains why there's so much more grain on noise in the image so if you get your exposure wrong in the camera if you under expose your image you're actually using a much higher ISO once you're correct it and post it's a really important concept to understand and that makes it even more important to correctly expose your photos I do this by using the histogram I did a video on this you're free to watch if you push your histogram as far to the right you're going to be the ISO that you're going to use is going to be accurate because you're not going to be increasing your exposure and post and introducing more noise so a lot of people do under expose their images and when you increase it or increase or increase the shadows you start to get all this noise and you're possibly wondering why and that's generally the case is that when you increase the exposure you're actually increasing the amount of noise and your images your camera is the third thing that's really important and how much noise you're going to create not all cameras are created equal the newer cameras have much better sensors for high ISO handling capabilities so the latest one DX mark three or some of the Sony's and icons you can push that ISO up pretty high before you start seeing noise or mne image quality issues so just know that generally full-frame cameras will handle the noise better and crop bodies or micro four-thirds but the amount of megapixels can also dictate how much noise generally the lower the megapixels the less noise you're going to have I won't try and explain why this is but just know that the newer cameras are much better so if you have a older camera or perhaps an older crop body you're going to get more noise than these newer cameras and unfortunately that's just the way it and if you are having serious issues with noise you may have to upgrade your camera so the fourth thing that impacts noise is how much you crop your images I actually think this happens more often than not a lot of images that I see maybe people send to me or that I've reviewed and there's often a lot of noise but when I look closely it's often because people have cropped heavily so if you can imagine if you've got a full-frame image and then you crop it significantly if there's any noise that image it's going to be exaggerated by the crop because you're going to be closer to it you've zoomed into it so the more you crop the more noise you're going to have so you have a look at this image of a white plumed haneda I actually took this at ISO 6400 so pretty so quite a high ISO because I didn't have that much light at the full-frame shot you can see a bit of noise but it's not really an issue however if I was to crop and tight for a portrait you can see how much more noise is now visible and that's simply because I've cropped it I haven't changed the amount of noise it's just the crop and unfortunately people you know if you struggle in the field to get close to a bird you'll often have a tendency to crop it and post to make up for that and and I don't think that's the right way to do it if you can't get close in the field I wouldn't use cropping as a way to overcome that I'd perhaps just leave more space around the bird and give it some habitat often those shots can look just as good I'd rather a wide shot that and have terrible image quality as opposed to a heavily cropped one that did okay so I hope you've got a good understanding of what causes noise in your images I'll just recap them on the screen quickly that is a dark scene a dark background an underexposed image high ISO setting your camera and the amount you crop will all influence how much noise you have in your images so what is the best way to reduce the amount of noise we get in the field that probably the most important thing is we want to ensure you have the correct exposure use a histogram and exposed to the right by having the correct exposure you're going to have an accurate ISO and you won't be introducing noise later on be aware of the brightness of your background try and use brighter scenes than dark scenes if you can try to avoid cropping your images too much you can use slower shutter speeds which will allow lower ISO settings and maybe look at upgrading your camera that handles high ISO well if it's an issue for you ok the last thing I want to show you is how you deal with noise and post so you've got home you've downloaded your images you've loaded it up and I you've got all this noise and you're not quite sure how to overcome it well thankfully there's a lot of software available to do that I personally use some software called topaz D noise I did do a long review of this that you're free to watch but I'll be very quick here and show you how it works topaz de noise is a plugin so you can use it in Lightroom Photoshop or standalone I generally use it in Photoshop because I like to mask out the bird just be careful when you're applying the noise reduction not to do it heavily on the bird because it can reduce sharpness and it just looks a bit it doesn't look the best so I generally just do noise reduction to the background I've got the yellow thread scrubber Ian I showed you earlier open and Photoshop as you can see you've got lots of noise I'll activate the Topaz D noise plug-in and it's opened up the D noise software and we apply some basic settings on the right hand side you can see a few sliders you can see the side-by-side here we've got noisy image on the left and we've got the on the right the image with the noise reduction applied I can also use a slider and I can drag it from left to right and you can see just how well it's worked you know from noise to no noise it's actually pretty amazing how it works and even the bird doesn't look too bad in this instance to be honest so I'm happy with that I simply hit apply and it will apply that noise reduction then opens it up has a layer in Photoshop and now I can choose to mask out the bird if I want I II what that means is so not if I create a mask it doesn't apply the noise reduction to the bird in this case that doesn't make that much of a difference but that's the noise reduction applied it's as simple as that and then I'll export that and it's done so that's how quick the noise reduction software works by using this software you can definitely help people with really noisy images you don't have to have this paid software Lightroom does have built-in noise reduction doesn't work quite as well but it is an option if you pay for the software well if you made it this far thank you very much for watching I really hope you learned something today I hope I was able to explain what noises and how to remove it and reduce it I hope it's not as much of a concern for you anymore if you like this content please give it a thumbs up subscribe if you want to see more of these videos leave a comment below with any questions you have I will definitely add to them I really enjoy the support the channels getting I'm looking forward to the next video already thank you for watching take care and see you later

Channel: Duade Paton

Views: 34,032

Keywords: bird photography tips, bird photography, wildlife photography, nature photography, Post processing, Bird photo editing in photoshop, bird photography tutorial, noise reduction, noise removal, how to remove noise from wildlife images, topaz denoise ai review, topaz denoise ai tutorial, Noise Explained, How to reduce noise in images, what causes noise, ISO explained, How to get higher shutter speeds, Light Value, wildlife techniques to remove noise, what is noise, exposure

Id: TwmvenzIWv4

Length: 18min 7sec (1087 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 26 2020