I downloaded the full version of silkypix, (on 14 day trial) and it certainly has lots of good features.

but i can't get anywhere near the amount and smoothness of noise reduction that I can out of neatimage. Am i missing something? I'm just playing with sliders that appear on the NR / sharpen tab. is there some other function with noise profiling or something?

also the result I get with everything turned off, ie as close to the actual raw file as possible, is really very different from capture one. is this normal or do i need to look for other things to turn off?

[quote="MattMatic"]I tried out silkypix and the noise reduction didn't seem anywhere near as good as what neatimage will do. Or do i have to buy it to make it work fully?

doing it directly from RAW is a huge advantage to the workflow though.

are you saying that silkypix has better NR than neatimage? or just that its still a big improvement on none?

as far as pushing the physics goes, handheld is not so much the limitation but subject movement, and i think there's way more potential in improvement in the sensor technology at low light, until we hit the level of counting individual photons as discussed a lot earlier on this thread! but it is certainly pushing the limits of current technology!

certainly at the moment I have no gripes with the DS, its produced some great shots and both my lenses and my skills need improvement before it does.

the one exception to that would be noise at 1600 iso. if perfectly exposed it still looks OK, and I've been playing with neatimage which is amazing! but It's the one area where there's a technical limitation that would actually make a big difference to the quality of the shots i can take. So i'm interested in just how much better the K10D actually is.

faster lenses and more light would make more difference than the camera noise though!

taking good shots of a moving subject illuminated by one or two 60W bulbs, usually poorly placed relative to the subject, often with coloured filters on them... i think it comes under the heading "recreational impossibilities".....

good points, i will keep thinking about it, although i don't know if i'll afford a K10 before the next new thing comes out...

i guess i'm frustrated with trying to nail the exposure so the resolution is where i want it, its much more than just filling the histogram (and in low light even that is hard enough).

i have a real world example of that, but it will be a day or 2 before i can dig it out and post.

so since the K10 already does all this wonderful stuff, is it much less noisy in low light than the older models?

it doesnt seem to be ahaed of the field on shadow noise especially from the tests i've seen, but then tests are often badly performed...

I still think its missing a trick to set iso pre exposure when it could be done post with much better knowledge of what the exposure actually was.

I also think that its not the best use of a limited available file resolution to record the data linearly, even though that is how the CCD works.

its quite normal in other fields to map values between different devices to make the best use of the available resolution.

the output of the CCD is still analogue so mapping it should be easy. if our eye regards each halving of light as being the same increment then it would make sense to allocate resolution that way.

although - we don't do it in audio capture either, but then audio is all 24bit capture now so it isnt really needed anymore.

I guess the K10D is 22bit capture, but then instantly and linearly converted back to 12bit which seems such a waste!

amplitude mapping noise reduction systems were used in analog in the bad old days of 12bit or tape. I guess thats what I'm advocating here until we get 16bit raw files.

actually i think some cameras do a bit of this sort of mapping anyway at the bright end. but the stuff i've seen about it was unclear. it might have just been for in camera jpg conversion which isnt really relevant.

well physics vs physiology if you like.

so when reducing resolution to a given file size it should be mapped in a way that is useful to our physiology.

light isn't made up of just red green and blue either, but we represent it like that because our eyes sense it like that.

see what I mean?

does the auto ISO on the K10D work in smaller steps than the usual 200 400 etc? if so then i guess its going to be close with multi segnment metering to doing it quite well anyway...


that detail being in the upper part of the histogram is just bad design seems to me, surely that should be mapped on a standard curve anyway?

otherwise you are constantly on a knife edge between clipping and loss of detail...

I take your point, but i wasnt really meaning to do it that way as a perfect solution just as an improvement on what we have now that still allows the same raw format.

normalising to full scale will increase shadow detail too since any level steps available above the brightest recorded in the raw file are wasted. The system i describe ensures maximum DR possible for the 12bit file. of course a 16bit file would be better though!

in a raw file you don't really need to know where the midtones will be because its not attempting to be the final image, that can be worked out later.

the system i describe would work best if the brightest point in the pic is an important part of the image, if not it will throw away a little shadow detail in order to preserve the unecessary highlight detail, but it won't throw away as much as we currently have to to ensure that we don't clip using preexposure ISO setting, so its still an improvement unless you are in the habit of always clipping unecessary highlights by the exact perfect amount when shooting.

since clipping is always the absolute end of that part of the image i often try to expose to avoid it completely, this involves me in wasting DR to ensure that. i have to leave headroom. we shoot with raw because it gives us more headroom than 8bit, but a 12bit raw that doesnt need any headroom is better again, although still not as good as a 16bit raw.

so i wasnt advocating any more complex tonemapping than is already done by the ISO setting.

I do see what you mean though...

Matt, yes we have discussed at least part of this before. i was taking a new (for me anyway) angle on it

so you are saying that they've already done away with the variable amplifier!

which means that the ISO setting on the K10D is ALREADY done in software!

which is 99% of what i am advocating hardware wise. but it fails to really take advantage of doing it this way.

I'm assuming the ISO setting is still set pre exposure, but if the whole dynamic range of the sensor is already being captured then that makes no sense, the 22bit data could be scanned for peaks then normalised and dithered to fit the 12bit raw file, the files would be the same raw we have now, but theyd never be clipped except in high light, the brightest level would be preset to the brightest level in the file, and you'd never have to set the ISO.

If this is already what the K10 auto iso setting does i'll be impressed! but i think not! (i don't have one to test)

except for the last post they don't seem to have understood that ISO setting in a digital camera is achieved by changing the amplifier gain on the CCD output.

but I don't have time to sign up to another forum to discuss it with them!

my original point was that by reading the CCD at lowest amplification and high bit depth to digitise the entire dynamic range of the sensor in one go we both reduce amplifier noise and eliminate the need for ISO setting entirely. assuming the ADC is capable of accurate conversion at very low input levels of course, but then if its isnt, then theres no point to the high bit depth anyway.