What's That Noise?

Noise has always been an undesirable feature of digital images at high ISO's. More recently, however, there has been talk of "good" or "desirable" film grain-like noise, particularly with the Ricoh GR-D. Being a Ricoh GR-1 user, I have been getting more and more attracted to the Ricoh GR-D. In fact, if it were not for a price tag nearly double that of, say, the Fuji F30, I would have already gotten one.

Now, I do not dislike film grain. In fact, my favorite all-around film/developer combination is on the grainy side - Agfa APX 100 with Rodinal. When I shoot in low-light, it is usually high contrast indoor environmental-type portraits, with fast lenses from 28 to 50mm. More commonly, my choice then would be pushed Tri-X, with partial stand development in Rodinal. Again, lots of grain.

My only digital camera is my trusty old Olympus C5050. While it has a very sharp Zuiko 35/1.8 lens, it only goes to ISO 400. On the other hand, I figure the lens is also about one f stop faster than the Ricoh. I had never used it at its highest ISO, as I had always assumed that the grain would give me unusable images. With all this talk of "good grain," I decided to do some testing of my own.

Below are three successive test shots, of a typical low-light picture I would make. I decided to use the 50mm focal length, at f/2. They were taken at ISO 100, ISO 400, and ISO 400 with noise reduction ON.

ISO 100

ISO 400




ISO 400 + Noise Reduction

I then post-processed the images as I normally would: levels adjustment (none needed in this case), resized, channel mixer b/w conversion, minimally sharpened, toned, final adjustment of brightness and contrast. For this particular image, I added a touch of soft focus. I don't know if this would affect visible noise levels, but I wanted this to be a "real world" test - i.e. to see the noise levels in photos processed the way I like them. YMMV, especially if you are the type to look at 200% crops.

The ISO 100 image is very clean, almost too clean compared to what I am used to. In fact, I was surprised to find that I somewhat preferred the ISO 400 images. In monochrome, I did not find the noise objectionable at all even at my usual posting size of 750 pixels in the longest side. At 500 pixels (or flickr slideshow size), I doubt I would even be able to tell. Lastly, and I may just be missing it, but I could not see any noticeable difference in the image with noise reduction enabled.

Well, as surprised as I am with my subjective results, more experimentation will be needed. I will need to take some night time shots, as well as see how prints look like. I'll also need to experiment with "snap focus" settings. So far, I have used the Olympus at 35mm @ f/5.6 with manual focus set at hyperfocal distance (with a russian 35mm VF on the shoe!). I'll need to see if this can be done feasibly at f/1.8.