Is This A Common Problem?

I'd prefer to do it at the start, but given the heavy CPU intensive nature of Lightroom, needs must.

I've never noticed any slowing down of Lightroom during noise reduction, sounds a bit odd...is your computera bit slow generally?
I have found Topaz de-noise slows things down though, so I've stopped using that.

With respect, don't get hung up on the word rule. It doesn't mean someone is issuing a command, the phrase simply means "usually", or "all else being equal".

The comment merely means that as lower ISO values equal lower noise, so it may make sense to use the lowest ISO that you can in whatever the circumstances may be. A long exposure by moonlight can happily be ISO100, whereas an action shot by moonlight might benefit from incresing the ISO, but by no more than we need to for an appropriate shutter speed.

Unless of course we want noise, and then the "rules" of the game change again.

It was an experiment really.(an alcohol fueled experiment)I moved the ISO around 400 to 3200.I turned up the EV to +3( but it seems that would not affect a RAW file). It was a rock band on a small stage and they were trying to put some energy in to it so 1/25 would not have worked IMHO.Noise reduction does slow my machine down, although its not cutting edge technology. I'm just sorting through the 326 of them (is this normal?)mostly very dark, although I am getting something back from them.I'm slightly annoyed by the noise on them, but maybe I was expecting too much.

If you can't shoot at 1/25, you could probably get away with something not too fast and the flash power dialled down a bit. This would have given images with less noise than no flash as you could have used a lower ISO. However, I'm a bit puzzled with your observations that there is too much noise, unless it was extremely dark in there.

A few weeks ago I shot a load of images at my Niece's 18th in pretty dark conditions and on most I did not use flash. To get a decent shutter speed (1/25th to 1/80th) I had to shoot at 1250 ISO and a wide aperture of f2.8. The images were shot with a K-x, as my K-5 was at the repairers; bear in mind that although the K-x is great in low light, it cannot come close to the K-5. The resulting images were excellent IMHO and had very little intrusive noise, even without applying noise reduction.

Can you post a couple of pics so we can have a look?

Regards
David

I'll have a go when I get my head round it. Lightroom on auto exposure gave the ISO 800 files +10, if that means anything to you. Although I think that is a glich in the programme. When I turned it down 1 click it said +5

If sometimes, when shutter speed and/or aperture are not important to the shot, then yes I agree that as you say "it may make sense" to use the lowest ISO you can.

however I'm sure most peopel would agree that in most shots selection of shutter speed and Aperture to match the shot requried is more imortant than the ISO.

That's why I challenged it as being a 'general rule'

Smeggy hates "rules" BTW! any kind, it's his pet hate I think?

Well, as a rule it is....

I'm glad to hear from you both about the EV. I didn't completely waste my time

didn't see Yves comment tucked away at the bottom of his reply

No no no!!!

Lightroom is laid out in a logical sequence. In develop module you work down the various sliders from top to bottom, that's how it's been designed. This way you set colour balance then exposure etc....

That's how intuitive Lightroom is it has the workflows built in in order, even the modules are in order, e.g library then develop then publish etc...

Oops didn't quote the post I was replying too...