STOP using the WRONG ISO!

this video is sponsored by mpb.com check out the link in the description of the video to save money by buying used camera gear no matter the shop genre grasping the concept of iso is a Cornerstone of Photography that became more evident than ever on my recent trip to svelpark Greenland and Iceland where I had to photograph at higher isos than what I'm used to as a landscape photographer in this video we are going to take a fast brush up of what ISO is what its relation is to aperture and shutter speed when to use what ISO take a look at some high ISO examples how the trade-off of using higher isos is becoming less and less relevant and how Adobe is revolutionizing denoising and making older cameras much more relevant again ISO stands for International Organization for standardization and is an acronym so in photography we use the word itself ISO ISO refers to the sensitivity of your camera's sensor to light more specifically it controls the brightness of your photo not the exposure when we're talking about exposure we are referring to the interplay between shutter speed and aperture only these two settings determine how much light actually hits your sensor ISO on the other hand doesn't directly impact exposure simply because it does not impact how much light actually hits the sensor it only impacts how bright your fossil will be if the combination of your shutter speed and aperture cannot deliver a properly lit photo due to the circumstances that you are photographing in then you can turn up the iso to get the properly lit photo such circumstances can be the lack of available light you having to use a fast shutter speed to freeze the moment or using a closed down aperture because you want a deep depth of field but still want a specific shutter speed the trade-off of using High ISO values is that you reveal the noise in the photo so digital noise when raising the ISO in your camera is analog to when you raise the volume knob of your car radio and you hear that hiss or noise from a bad signal so the signal in the car radio is already bad that's why you hear the noise just like the amount of light hitting your sensor is not enough so you have to dial up the volume or the brightness and that reveals that digital or the noise so basically you're just amplifying an already bad signal with modern full-frame cameras the noise generally becomes quite visible around the values ISO 1600 3200 or above however if you are heavy-handed in editing like adding a lot of contrast dehazing or Clarity the noise will easily be revealed even at lower ISO values like ISO 400 200 and even in some cases ISO 100 this is why there is a rule of thumb that states that you generally want to use as low an isos possible because you do not want to reveal all this noise this does not mean that you should just put your camera on the lowest possible ISO and then forget about it it means the lowest possible ISO for the circumstances that you're photographing in I'll show you some examples about this in just a moment you use the combination of the shutter speed and aperture to get an optimal exposure relative to the scene or subject that you are photographing if that combination of the shutter speed and the aperture does not give a properly lit photo then you can increase the iso even within nature photography there are sub-gangers such as landscape photography macro photography and Wildlife photography these sub-gangers work on the very different circumstances which also means that you will have to use different settings to get an optimal exposure and an optimally lit photo because you for the most part work from a position of no movement in both macro and landscape photography you do not have to take the shutter speed too much into consideration unless there is movement in your scene which generally isn't as a macro photographer there can be as a landscape photographer however it's a completely different story when it comes to Wildlife photography where there is a lot of movement both because you may be hand holding your camera or at the very least shooting from some kind of gimbal tripod setup and you're photographing moving animals so you need a faster shutter speed all this generally boils down to the fact that in Wildlife photography you generally have to up the iso quite a lot whereas in landscape and macro photography you can generally keep it relatively low but let's look at some examples so right now we are in Adobe camera raw and you can see this photo here I just recently took in Iceland generally all the photos here are so if I zoom in you can see photographing at ISO 32 00 and the reason why I'm shooting at such and high ISO is because I actually wanted it to shoot at F16 because I wanted the background rocks here to be more in Focus than if I was shooting at let's say f56 or something like that I also wanted to make sure that all the puffins here in the foreground would be in Focus if I bring up the exposure you can even see how I'm really bringing out and revealing all this noise it is the same for this photo here and you can even see shooting at f13 only and 1 40th of a second because it's Wildlife you can see how the puffins are moving and that is not always optimal so you definitely want to consider shooting at a higher shutter speed and because of that you would probably have to increase the iso even more than 3200 here's another example shooting at 1 15 of a second and although I'm shooting all the way down an f63 my ISO is still 3200 and zooming in you can really also see the noise right here when I've probably lit I thought so one thing that's also important to take into consideration is whether you're photographing with an ISO variant camera or an ISO invariant camera so an ISO varying camera is the classic older cameras the dslrs they are not ISO invariant and that's simply means that it is best for you to increase the ISO on location so that if you want to properly lit photo you should increase the iso in the camera however if you photograph with an ISO invariant camera you can look these details up on Google whether your camera is ISO variant or ISO invariant then you can increase the exposure in post processing and not revealing more grain or even adding more grain to the photo after you have taken it so whether I increase the ISO on location or if I'm doing it post processing I will end up with the same result that is not the case with an ISO variant camera here you definitely want to nail the exposure and increase the brightness to the favorable level for the photo in the field and in this photo here you can see there is just so much noise as shot this at ISO 12 800 and because it's like a lot of flying puffins I had to shoot it at like 1 160th of a second just so don't get the puffins too blurry and that is also the case with this one here that puffins were even closer to the camera so I had to shoot with an even faster shutter speed bringing me down to f63 again but I could shoot at ISO 320 however the puffins are a little bit out of focus especially in the front ones here because I wanted to focus on the background Cliffs this photo here I saw 320 and you can also see there is a little bit of noise in this photo but it's not too bad you can see I'm zooped into like 500 so it's not a big deal and of course if you want to learn more about composition and how uncompose my photos be sure to get my two eBooks on exactly that topic here go through all my different compositional tools not rules the ebooks are easy to read with minimal Tech next and they have loads of examples as to get to the point fast there are links to both of them down in the description of the video Adobe has released their new denoising tool and that is mind-blowingly good if you go down here to detail and then we select this denoise and we use the iso 12000 as an example you can see zooming in I can press denoise and here I get a little preview of how much it's able to reduce the noise in the photo this year is ridiculous depending on your computer and your graphic card settings it can take more time or less time if you remember back a couple of weeks where I made my video about the a7r5 long term review I said that my own computer now took 50 minutes I actually managed to solve that issue it was because there was like two gpus two graphic cards at play at the same time so it wasn't or Bridge or camera roll was not utilizing the fast graphics card so I actually managed to get it down to denoising my photos in like 20 seconds however now I've got a MacBook Pro and it also works with the 20 seconds so you can just press enhance we don't want to wait for that you can see I've already done that and you can see here it has cleaned up the photo so much more the same is the case for this photo here and if we compare to the original ISO 3200 and this year is cleaned up and the last example you can probably hardly even see it now with this new denoising all cameras have become much more relevant so in this example here this is a night photo I've taken on a Pitch Black Knight however I could see the Northern Lights but I could not see the foreground as as you can see here as I zoom in taking at ISO 640 only but on a Canon 5D Mark III this foreground here is utterly utterly useless you can see if I remove all the edits how it looked straight out of camera and with edits so that I can actually see it especially the foreground it's just completely useless now if I go into a denoised version of this photo here you can see it has just cleaned it up almost to perfection in the sky down here because the original photo wasn't the best and you see if I bring up the exposure you can see it is much better than this one here however it is a little bit soft in the fixed photo and of course I'm sharing these editing tips with you but if you want to learn even more about editing be sure to enroll in my huge Photoshop landscape photographers post processing course here I hear all my different editing techniques I've just updated the course with new videos that cover all the new Tools in Photoshop and Camera raw I introduce you to the different programs I give you all my tricks and tips on how to use different techniques I use different ways to gain the same effect and you can learn that too so you can decide what you want to use and then I have like 10 or 11 start to finish tutorials with all sorts of different subjects if you want to save a little bit of money there is a coupon code down in description along with a link to their Photoshop up course and here's another example from Death Valley taken with f5d Mark II all the way back in 2016. if I zoom in ISO 1600 you can see the sky is acceptable for such an old camera the foreground here is a little bit more iffy however if we use the denoise you can really see there's almost no noise left in the sky and if we zoom in here the noise is only very very little however the foreground is out of focus because I shot it like F14 but nevertheless you can really see how this software cleans up even old camera photos it's quite impressive however this tool is not a fix all so in this example right here from a Northern Lights evening I took this spring with my Sony a7r5 you can see the foreground is very very noisy even the trees here and if we zoom into the sky there's a decent amount of noise you can see this is how it looked without edits and because I really have to bring out the foreground to be able to see it of course I'm revealing more noise however if I go in and clean up the photo with the noise reduction tool you can see the sky is ridiculously good cleaned up the tree here is super sharp even shot at like ISO 3200 at F18 but if we go down into the grass you can see this looks super weird right here and that is simply just because I guess that the program doesn't have enough details to work with it tries to clean this up and it just looks super weird even down here in the road we get all these weird weird artifacts however the good thing is I will share with you how I solve this issue so we're here in Photoshop and this is how the final file looks like so if I just turn off all my different adjustment layers here you can see what's interesting is what's going on down here so I'm using a blend of a sky one of the Skies simply just a single exposure that I have used you can see here enhanced noise reduction in camera raw but for the foreground I have stacked several different individual exposures from this session here so I think it was like 13 or something like that so if I just open up the smart object you can see it's all these different exposures here that I have stacked you can stack them simply just by selecting them all here in Photoshop right click and convert to Smart object once you've converted this to a Smart object then you simply go into layer smart objects stack mode and you can press mean or median in this example here in this way when we stack all these photos we average out the noise in the bottom part of the photo we also average out in in the sky and because we're photographing Northern Lights we basically just end up with like one big blow we don't want that that is why it's good that the noise reduction works on the sky however we need to go through a few more Hoops to make the ground work now I do have an individual tutorial here on my YouTube channel for doing exactly this you can check it out up in the corner now if we zoom into the final photo this here is how the foreground then looks and if we add in the sky however if we just disable this layer mask you can actually see how the foreground it's just looking weird as we just saw before this is why we only want to use it for this guy so yes I would definitely argue that adobe has revolutionized the noising if you want to have it even more noise free than what the denoising can do then you can always adjust the slider or as in my example I actually used to pass denoising because it also adds some sharpness to the photo and as I mentioned with all these new softwares and algorithms all the cameras has actually become much more relevant so if you want to buy an old camera definitely check out mpb.com it's a big platform where you can buy and sell used camera gear averagely people save up to 30 percent on gear and you even get a six months warranty it's super easy to use whether you want to sell or buy new camera gear you can just do it all through the platform they figure out all the shipping details for you and it doesn't just work in UK or the US it also also works in Continental Europe and if you want to sell your gear through mpb you can actually just go in and get your gear quoted very simple and once MPP has your gear in hand they may even update that quote so you can sell it for a little bit more if the gear is in really good quality I would highly appreciate if you use the link down description so that mpb can see that it's actually relevant for them to sponsor my videos as always I'd highly appreciate a like be sure to share the video with your photography Friends check out the links down in the description of the video if you want to learn more or save some money on used camera gear as always thank you for watching see you next time

Channel: Mads Peter Iversen

Views: 270,789

Keywords: photography, landscape photography, ISO, iso, iso shutter speed, iso shutter speed aperture, iso shutter speed aperture tutorial, iso camera, how to use iso, when to up iso, how pro's use iso, camera settings iso, camera settings, iso landscape photogrpahy, iso photography, iso wildlife photography, reduce noise, how to reduce noise, iso explained, best noise reductions, noise reduction, noise reduction lightroom, noise reduction cameraraw, photography tutorial

Id: bS0_Ln3ERws

Length: 17min 29sec (1049 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 06 2023