Hockey game under lights: 20k ISO on m4/3

This is a good test image as there is a good amount of both luma and chroma noise…

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@blj yeah I have noticed that, figured it was a quirk of the camera. It also is not consistent when doing multiple exposures (like 10s exposures when light-painting) even when everything is set to manual fixed settings. Most will be magenta tinged, some will be green heh.

@jorismak that is unreal crispness from what that started as! I’m guessing Dxo Photolab doesnt run on Linux, from looking at their site.

Of course, if I happened to be doing this for a living I’d get something like an A7R4 with BSI sensor for a bit of a leg up. But I am super impressed with this camera, bought the G9 second hand with 4K shutter count, so to me it’s like new!

I am wondering if I should have exposed to the right and pushed ISO to the max 25600 :thinking:
I’ll see at another game.

In light limited situations there’s little benefit to ETTR. You’re well above the point where raising ISO helps signal-to-noise ratio.

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that was my suspicion yeah, it looked a lot noisier in the camera preview for no real gain (shutter was high enough), so moved it back to 20000.

Wow, I took a look at the pp3 and there are a hundred fifty three parameters to the wavelets tool, and that’s not counting multiple curve points per parameter.

It would certainly need to be boiled down to one or two parameters, I think, like I managed with the chroma NR (which is just one strength parameter in Filmulator).

I think I’m happy with nonlocal means though.

Yeah, the complete wavelet module in RawTherapee has a ton of (fine-) tunable options.

Assuming that the base settings can be easily automated (based on small/average/large MP RAWs) you’re still left with 15 or so denoise/refine related options. Some can be left at their default settings but that still leaves 5 (6?) that need to be tuned.

And to be honest: I did also use wavelets’ Edge sharpness to get some of the details back. And that one is tricky to set up!

I think that might fit Filmulator better then a wavelets based denoise option.

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darktable i warmed the image even though tehnically it would be quite cool and green. i left more noise in to keep some of the texture and what detail i could
NIGELSWAN GirlsHockey 1233001.rw2.xmp (34.2 KB)

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Pushing ISO won’t capture more light, it just amplifies the signal of the sensor.

To get less noise, lower aperture or use a longer shutter… but that’s easier said that done when photographing a sports game :s.

If you had a camera that adds (a lot of) noise to the shadows after boosting the signal, it helps to separate ‘your signal’ from ‘the shadows’. This is mostly true for older Canon’s. I actually know very little of Panasonic sensor designs (and I do believe Panasonic still uses their own?)

But on most modern sensors this is less of an issue, the sensor adds little noise of it’s own. Most noise you see is ‘analog noise’ from capturing less than ideal amounts of light (and/or shot noise) or the most common one: noise in the sensor from boosting the ISO, which means that your quality will only suffer by going higher up the ISO ranges.

Notable exceptions are cameras that have multiple ‘native ISOs’, where there is a sudden ‘jump’ down in noise in a specific ISO setting, and then the noise starts increasing again from that point up.

Or cameras that just don’t actually change anything at all while you increase the ISO, they just write different metadata and/or base-curves to the RAW file to increase the exposure ‘automatically in post’ :).

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yeah, as far as I am aware it only has 200 as the native ISO; and yes I agree on all points.

I have noted worse “noise” when pushing shadows from lower ISO with less than ideal exposure, so this was a bit of an experiment for me which basically worked better than I expected. The noise at 20k vs 800, is better than comparing 800 to 200(native) from what I can tell. If I can shoot close to native, I am sometimes better shooting native ISO200 and lifting slightly in post, however if I need to shoot above 800ISO, then I’m better off just lifting ISO to where it needs to be I think. Seems to be the case at least from my short tests.

My understanding is the ISO amplification is applied to the raw sensor signal before converting the analogue signal to digital to save, so in theory should be better than doing the same thing in post. In theory. And not all cameras are the same, of course. Was an interesting test though.

The cast is strong with this one. Not sure how I would tackle it.

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