[saqib]

I bought the Canon 650D about six months ago and have taken almost 1000 photos with it todate. I always shoot Raw+ jpg so I never really had the need to process my Raw files until now when I got interested in stock photos and stuff.

To get up to speed with the world of stock photography, I’m reading Rob Sylvan’s terrific guide ‘Taking Stock’.

In it he emphasizes that you’ve to inspect your photos 1:1 to identify any aberrations and unwanted artefacts because that’s what the inspectors at any stock agency do to judge your photos.

Now the problem is that when I imported my photos into Lightroom (4.4), which I’m using for the first time, I discovered that at actual size all my photos have noise. Not some noise but considerable noise, at least to me, unless I’m being overly critical of my own work.

What on earth is happening here?

1. Am I doing something wrong here? I always strive to shoot at ISO 100. Sometimes I use the tripod, sometimes I don’t. But that seems to have no bearing on the noise outcome.

2. Is there something wrong with my camera? Or is it an inherent problem with 650D?

3. Is there something with the lenses? I mostly shoot with Tokina 11-16mm. Noise remains constant whether I shoot at wide open at 2.8 or at F22. Ditto for the time of day. Sometimes I shoot with the kit lens 18-55mm. Both lenses are giving the same noise level. Both can’t be faulty at the same time, or can they?

4. What can I do to stop this from happening in the future?

5. What can I do to salvage my previous work?

6. Should I use Lightroom to reduce luminance and color noise on all my photos? Rob discourages from reducing too much noise as it reduces sharpness and turns the details all mushy which will defeat the purpose of noise reduction in the first place as it will get the photo rejected by the stock inspector. What do you think?

7. How much noise reduction to apply so that it gets the pictures past the inspector? Remember no noise is visible when you see the images in normal view.

8. Is there a better tool than Lightroom for reducing noise? Should I use that before importing the photo into lightroom for further processing?

9. Or is everything ok and the only thing wrong is my laptop monitor calibration? If that’s the case how do I rectify that?

10. How can I get your input on this? Should I upload one of the Raw files. Is it possible here considering the large size? Or should I convert it to jpg and then show it? Won’t that reduce the noise level that I wanted to show you?