Further to Don's post, you will find some reviews of noise reduction software here:

http://www.photozone.de/7Digital/noisenew.htm

There are other online review as well, so do not take the above as gospel truth. FWIW I recently purchased Noise Ninja as I liked the interface when I tried the demo.

Thanks Don and Leif, I am "getting the picture".
Just had a look at Neat Image, and I see a Freeware
edition for personal use is available; have downloaded
that, and I will "giv'em a go". Thanks for the URL.

You are not alone, sir!

Incidentally, Adobe Camera Raw supports quite a lot of cameras other than SLRs - my wife's Olympus 5600, for instance.

And Treeve's Finepix 9500

When shooting in RAW I use the 'luminance smoothing' and 'colour nise reduction' sliders in the detail module of Adobe Camera RAW (or Lightroom) to deal with any noise issues. I find this gives a better result, removing less fine detail, rather than converting and then using Noise Ninja.

I thought Nikon NX Capture included NR ??

It does, but it is poo if it is anything like the NR in NC 4.

It does Rob but I do not use it. D2X noise is very random but it can show up in dark areas over ISO 400. I use selective sharpening instead of NR to overcome those probs. In the days of film I mainly used Tech Pan at ISO 12 or Agfapan at ISO 25 for B&W, and in colour tranparency the fastest I used was ISO 50. Now being able to go up to ISO400 with the D2X's resolution and quality is good enough for me.

Don

Given that treeve has PSP 7 ( no RAW conversion available ) rather than Photoshop, I have had a net wander but am unable to find a downloadable RAW test image from the 9500. Thought being to see if Rawshooter Essentials ealier freebee version could read the file.

While on that trawl I came across the RAW write times for the 9500. A pedestrian 9.8 secs compared with 3 secs for a Jpeg fine. Given that the camera cannot take another shot while the buffer is emtying from a burst of 3 jpeg fine, then using RAW suggests a frame rate of one per 10 secs.

So a lot will depend on the low light situations that treeve is contemplating.

Don

I have checked out the camera database website;
Write up on the S9500 is not actually that bad; it
did seem to give me the conclusion that there was
precious little point in taking RAW on it, though.
I will bear in mind all I have learned from all the experts
on this Forum when getting a DSLR in the near future.
The other point is, in relation to this and noise, etc.,
do Nikon bodies have White Balance access via buttons?

The low light situations I have in mind are a dark evening
with mist; night shots over a harbour; woodlands without
sunshine; in the machine rooms of ships, with available
light only, etc.,. ..

Best Wishes, Raymond

Raymond,

I have found your gallery in Ships Nostalgia and will look through it later when I get a chance. ( lots of pics there. ) It will help me in providing an answer specific to your needs.

Don

Kind of you Don ...
My other gallery is at
http://treeve.250free.com/hoo.htm
It includes pictures of around 1Mb on the Fishing Vessel side.
Raymond

a Turntable plays records at 33rpm +/-8% and 45rpm +/-8% but if you can use it, it can do so much more...

Even then the final effect of what is transferred to the audio pre-amplification and amplifiers, let alone the speaker assembly depends on the relationship of the disc to the turntable, the uniformity of speed, the drive method (direct or band), and especially the "needle" and its assembly.
Which one is the Weakest Link?

now we are just getting off the camera subject! a crap built needle is as a crap built lens, low quality not due to camera/turntable

Now, further question on the megapixel front ... Fuji Finepix S9500.
The Finepix has a setting for "F"ine which produces a 4.4Mb picture.
As opposed to the "N"ormal 2.2Mb, yet the number of pixels is
the same, so why is the file (jpeg) bigger, and what is the extra
information being stored in order for it to be called "Fine"?

treeve,

I have not forgotten your other question its just that I am a bit busy at the mo but I have not forgotten.

Re this question. Image size remains the same at 3488 x 2616 but 2.2mb of image info has been discarded through compression. If the image was a ship with a lot of sky then you may not notice. If the pic was of detail in say a marine engine then you may well.

Don

I have had direct drive and belt drive. For me belt drive wins hands down.

So in digital photography is that the sensor or the processing engine.

Oh I nearly forgot. Clive, I see the LP12 is still in production. Cost .... :eek: :eek: :eek:

Don

Hi Don and thank you; I see, half the image has been
thrown out, rather than the Fine setting adding info.
No probs - I am an extremely patient bloke, busy myself,
but my problem is that my mind dances around all the
time and when the question pops - out it comes, despite
the fact I am researching 22 ships for someone, and offering
what I have on a bit of local history to someone else.
I don't know what it is to be un-busy!!
Best Wishes, Raymond

Raymond,

Luckily Rob has picked up on this in his ' Data Compression ' thread and will do a lot better than me in explaining it.

Don

Megapixels – Are they important?
 

Doing a bit of catch up on whats happening in the Canon and Nikon announcements it seems for some people MP is everything. Already posters looking for 26mp in a DSLR.
Kind of makes you wonder how large these guys generally print to. I remember seeing some brilliant exhibition prints 20 x 16 from a 6mp D100 a few years ago.

It would be interesting to see the sales figures for the new 1DS mk III at 21mp in the amateur market. If I was a pro in advertising therefore requiring mega sized prints I would be going the Hassleblad route, 39mp, for the larger pixels. Also the huge advantage of a bigger focussing area.

Don

ImageKind, who have a reputation for high quality prints, say that improvements in printing technology, inks, and paper, has meant that printing at 137dpi is perfectly good enough. They seem to think that a 6mp camera is capable of quality prints up to 24in x 16 in.

http://www.imagekind.com/printing.aspx

I see that ImageKind refer to inkjet technology for 137dpi. Glossy Photo magazines are printed using halftone technology which are typically printed at 150dpi or greater. Halftone technology required the image to be at least double the dpi of the halftone frequency. Hence the requirement for 300dpi images.

Other than double spread, do glossy photo magazines normally print at anything approaching 24 x 16?

If you take a Glossy magazine printing a 15" x 11" photo @ 300dpi you would need a 14 Mp camera to Produce a 42Mbyte uncompressed file.

If you take newsprint which typically uses a 120 dpi or less halftone.

A spread in a tabloid 22" x 14" will require a 51Mbyte uncompressed file.

A spread in the Berliner Format (Broadsheet replacement) 18" x 24" will require a 71Mbyte uncompressed file.

I can recall when visiting a customer ( an advertising agency ) the images for the A0 bus shelter adverts were about 350Mbytes.

And yet Virgin Mobile managed to take half of this photo:
http://flickr.com/photos/chewywong/467623403/

and turn it into this:
http://flickr.com/photos/sesh00/515961023/

As the information in the image is low resolution (not very detailed) it certainly works in this case. Not so sure it would work so well with a highly detailed image.

Food for thought as to what is possible with 'small images' nowadays though. That 1000 pixel wide image can be enlarged quite a bit:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0708/07...geresizing.asp

Meanwhile newspapers have been known to steal 500 pix images for their pages:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncan/379512083/

not high quality glossy I know but still ...

If you need bigger files, have a look at this upsampling technique on Digital Outback. I've used it with good results to make a 90 cm wide image from a file only 3100 pixels wide - if I had made a straight print that would have only been ~85ppi. It also useful for upsampling to send images to labs that demand 300ppi images.

There is even a photoshop plugin to do the work for you :D