Topic: Canon 20D - Noise in RAW files?!?

[MikeW]

... from http://mikewren.com/comment.php?comment.news.54

Is my digital SLR camera, a Canon 20D, not all it's cracked up to be? Like a good geek, I've been slowly learning the path to true concert photography enlightenment (shooting more in RAW mode rather than high-res JPEG, more effectively using a sparse amount of fill-flash to highlight subjects on stage, etc.) However, at last night's Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey show on E. O'Dwyers, when opening my RAW files in Canon's EOS View Utility v1.1.0.15, most of the images contained noise similar to what you see below:



...and a slice at 100%:



WTF is that about? I'll be posting to photo message boards this afternoon to see if it's something I'm doing wrong or if it's a known weakness of the 20D (or all CMOS imaging sensors). Granted, I know red stage gels don't play nice with digi (leaving me to use the green channel for attempted greyscale rendering).

Any thoughts?

[dmonterisi]

have you tried opening the RAW files in ACR or c1 or any other Raw processing software??  it could be a software issue.

what ISO are you shooting at?

[MikeW]

have you tried opening the RAW files in ACR or c1 or any other Raw processing software??  it could be a software issue.

what ISO are you shooting at?

I haven't tried opening the RAW files in any other software (yet).  I just discovered that bumping the digital exposure compensation in the Canon utility (even .1) in either direction will completely remove the banding.  My hunch is it's probably a software glitch.... whew.

That particular picture was at 800... I was shooting between 400 and 3200, playing around.  anything above 800 with those red gels seem to really chew the sensor.

[MikeW]

Thanks for the suggestion dmonterisi!  Below is an exposure-compensated image, converted to grayscale and a little sepia thrown in with the Canon Utility, and unsharp mask in Photoshop. These results are much more acceptable:



This was shot at 3200 ISO... at 100% and in grayscale, it looks remarkably less like diginoise, and more like grain.   


EDIT: yep, it's a software bug with teh Canon utility   

[krebsy]

If you have the means to get/use Photoshop, I highly recommend it. I find the camera raw in PS to be incredibly versatile.

And most importantly, Nice photos!!

[JasonR]

Nice shot, Mike.  And thanks for following up!  I have the 20D on my short list of stuff to get soon, but if it was an actual hardware or unresolved firmware bug, I might have wanted to stick with my D30 for a while longer.

- Jason

[BCostigan]

I've found that strong red tones seem to produce noise-like symptoms in my 20D as well.  If you were shooting at ISO 800 and up some noise is to be expected.

My favorite software for the 20D raw files is Phase One Capture One Pro....I love it!!   You might also want to check out Noise Ninja.


The B+W version looks pretty good to me.

Oh...one last thought....you may want to reaserch your color space a bit.  What are you working in? Adobe 1998? sRGB?  In my travels sRGB is the standard and provides the most accurate colors.....Adobe 98 color space is way oversaturated IMHO.  Over saturation will also produce results that look like noise.