Pentaxophile wrote:
My K7 noise minimisation tips:
- Shoot RAW and use LR3
- Go for strong chroma noise reduction (the coloured specks), and go lighter on luminance noise (which looks more like a film-like grain).
- Make sure you do not underexpose, as readjusting the exposure in PP will make noise really bad! If possible, slightly overexpose and let your highlights clip ever so slightly (you may be able to recover them in Lightroom).
- You can use layers in Photoshop to apply hefty noise reduction to parts of the image while leaving other parts unaffected... where there is detail the noise is less visible and the detail is reduced by noise reduction, but solid areas like skies show noise quite obviously while being less adversely affected by strong noise reduction.
- Do not pixel peep too much! By the time you have resized your shot for the web or printed it, noise which was clearly visible at 1:1 will not (in many cases) be visible.