Noise on 60D

wuxiekeji · Joined: 15 Aug 2012 Posts: 213

Hi,
I always find that my 60D seems to have excessive noise even at low ISOs when shooting in low light. I find it especially true when using a wide angle (any wide angle, like Distagon 4/18 or Samyang 1.4/35) and especially true for shooting things with strongly coloured backgrounds. I've included an example below, 100% crop shot at 1/3 s, ISO 200, RAW with minimal post processing:

Is this abnormal? I've seen guides online recommending shooting in multiples of ISO 160 for video. Is this true for photographs as well?

RTI · Joined: 15 Jul 2011 Posts: 282 Location: Moldova, Chisinau

Smoli4 · Expire: 2013-06-07

how does ISO 100 look at these conditions?

Novembersierra · Joined: 29 Aug 2012 Posts: 4 Location: Venice, IT

Long exposure NR takes care of the noise for exposures of at least 1 sec or longer removing the infamous hot pixels.
Usual NR affects only the jpegs, obviously.

Having similar results (abit less actually) from my 40D, may I suggest you to make sure you don't have Higlight Tone Priority enabled?
It gives you a stop more of headroom, often preventing blown highlights and is damn useful in daylight/high contrast situations, but introduces awful noise, especially chroma noise, in the dark and shaded areas and it's obviously worst at night.

You can see if it's enabled or not by simply looking at the ISO: if it's like this '2oo' whith the little zeros and you cannot set them below 200, it's on, if it's like '200' and you can set them in their full range until iso 100, it's off.

It's like this on my 40, hope it's the same for the new models.

Nick

Nisseliten · Joined: 26 May 2012 Posts: 332 Location: Sweden

Something seems fishy to be honest, I took night shots a few weeks ago, 200 iso 30 seconds and got the same, or maybe a bit less noise on my 550D.

These are unedited shots, taken at 200iso 30sec exposure, straight from the raw file with no noise reduction applied.
Taken with the Leica Elmarit-R 19/2.8 at f4 or 5.6 if memory serves me right.
Highlight priority mode turned off.

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patrickh · Expire: 2011-11-18

I hated the noise on my 40D when I had it. It compared very poorly with my Nikon D200 and does not hold a candle to my Nex5N.

patrickh

wuxiekeji · Joined: 15 Aug 2012 Posts: 213

Orio · Expire: 2012-12-04

After having used 300D, 400D, and 50D, I am very happy with the noise performance of my 60D.
It holds up well with my 5D and 5DMkII.

s58y · Expire: 2013-09-10

You could try taking a dark frame at ISO200 and 1/3 sec, to make sure there's nothing going on with the lens and the sensor microlenses, etc.

Sometimes you can use software to get the recorded sensor temperature from the captured shot. If so, you can try to shoot the dark frame at about the same sensor temperature.

tanheis · Joined: 05 Sep 2007 Posts: 507 Location: Finland

Left your original. Right more noise reduction.
Bottom less noise reduction.

std · Joined: 09 Feb 2010 Posts: 1826 Location: Bulgaria

Your example looks underexposed , but still it has good detail.
An option could be to expose to the right (ETTR) and then correct the exposure in the raw converter.

fatdeeman · Joined: 13 Jun 2009 Posts: 780 Location: UK

It's a noisy sensor at the end if the day, I find the raw software used make a difference, capture one gives the most pleasing colours and detail but lots of noise, adobe camera raw is not quite as sharp but has better noise reduction. Canon Dpp probably gives the cleanest images but has the least options.

It's a bit disheartening to see noise at iso 100 but in reality it's not really an issue in prints, just annoying when looking at an image at 100% I find topaz denoise does a great job at reducing it, it's just a shame that it's necessary at such low iso!

A lot of people say the canon 18mp sensor is bad at low iso but relatively good at high iso!

I wish my 60d had the sensor from my nex-5n sometimes!

fatdeeman · Joined: 13 Jun 2009 Posts: 780 Location: UK

wuxiekeji · Joined: 15 Aug 2012 Posts: 213

rolocosta · Joined: 04 Aug 2012 Posts: 5

I have a 60D and had same low iso high noise issue in low light when shooting with my sigma 10-20mm.. later i sold it and got the canon counterpart and the images were brilliant.. did not see the issue any longer.. issue seemed to be with the lens not the camera..

sammo · Joined: 04 Jan 2012 Posts: 223 Location: CH and SI

Some info about how to get the best image quality at very low light levels (experience from astrophotography).

First, you have to keep in mind that for short exposure (daylight) photoghaphy ISO and noise correlation makes sense for easier interpretation, because you control the exposure time with it and don't feel a huge difference between, let's say 1/100 and 1/2000s, both are just a shot.
But when you are speaking about long exposure photography forget about ISO-noise relation, especially when you take photos in RAW, because ISO is just a gain setting in the detector's amplifier. What matters is how many photons do you detect, this is always the noise deteming factor.
A 30s ISO 100 and a 30s ISO200 photos will have basicly the same noise when you adjust the histogram levels on the raw photo (accualy in some cameras, like Canon 350D, it could happen that ISO200 is better!).

So to lower the noise you can either do obvious (get a more efficient sensor, better noise reduction), or you can do as astronomers do, substract raw dark frames (these accually don't make such a big difference with moder DSLR sensors) and stack images together to get more signal.