Hardwick Hall Illuminations

Tested the low light abilities of the K3iii at the Hardwick Hall Illuminations. As it was a pitch black night I had to push the ISO up to 12,800 with all shots taken with the 16-85 lens hand held. The resulting images were quite noisy so I processed them using Topaz Denoise.

1. As shot



2. Processed with Topaz Denoise



3. As Shot



4. Processed with Topaz Denoise



5. As Shot

Well, I don't know if it's my eyesight (could well be!), but I can't see a great deal of noise in the first place. The colours in no.2 are slightly more vibrant, though - intentionally so?

The noise isn't so visible in the images when uploaded onto the forum as it was in the Raw file, however the improvement can be seen in the blue of the tree trunk and the sharpness of the white framework of the large ball. There were no other adjustments applied other than the noise reduction in Topaz, but the smoothing of the noise does appear to make the colours more vibrant.

What did surprise me was how well the K3iii performed in an almost pitch back surroundings but with bright illuminations. The 16-85 lens struggled with auto focus so I switched to manual focus and used the viewfinder focus confirmation, again it was so dark I struggled to actually see when the image was in focus but focus confirmation worked really well. Next time I will take the monopod to reduce the chance of camera shake with the slow shutter speeds on some of the darker illuminations.

That’s pretty impressive! The latest software does appear to be something of a breakthrough, I gave up on a denoising software I bought a few years ago as the results weren’t good but recently I tried ON NoNoise which is transformative, not only does it eliminate noise but also sharpens without reintroducing it. To let you into a secret, I used it for my latest deer shots posted here! It doesn’t work in every case and only (as far as I can tell) across the whole image whereas in Lightroom I would selectively apply noise reduction where it was more obvious, but it is definitely an improvement. I am now revisiting some shots I took some time ago that were too noisy, which shows it is worth keeping otherwise decent shots on file even if at the time they aren’t obviously useable.