Taken on a photo trip with the club. Nikon D7000 + 70-300 VR, f/5.6, 1/500s to prevent motion blur, ISO 1600, then +3.4 EV in darktable; exported at 1/4 size, upscaled in chaiNNer using RealESRGAN_x4Plus, loaded into Gimp as layers, merged after lowering the opacity of the upscaled layer, exported at width 2048. Can you come up with something simpler / better? I’d like to avoid turning everything into a mush (and I’m not satisfied with my result, but it’s an old camera, so…).
I used multiple denoising options in DT. One tip I have for you is that increasing the ISO to get good exposure would actually reduce the noise. Underexposure is a bigger problem for noise than high ISO. Many photographers make the mistake of avoiding high ISO when it is needed because they presume it will increase the noise. 2024-09-18-18-53-01-DSC_0272.NEF.xmp (10.3 KB)
Thank you for a nice image to play with - I enjoy plane-spotting and -shooting.
I experimented with various denoising possibilities, but eventually “cheated” by noting that this was a night landing - the trees are supposed to be in heavy shadow!
I increased the exposure only for the aircraft and the airfield lights.
One of these two shots (I did not use a tripod, so they are not properly aligned) was taken at ISO 1600 (f/5.6, 1/25s), and boosted by darktable’s standard 0.7 + 3 EV. The other was taken at ISO 12800 (also (f/5.6, 1/25s), and was not boosted (other than the standard 0.7 EV).
Thank you for sharing; this one tested my sanity. Future generations walking around with consumer grade optical/neuronal implants with 20+ stops of DR will probably look back on these files as having “character.”
They may pay high premiums on our ‘retro’ cameras.
The last consumer DSLR from Nikon, the D7500, could have given me about a stop of advantage (its ‘low light ISO’ threshold, according to Photographic Dynamic Range versus ISO Setting, is 2631, compared to my D7000’s 1462).
Well, it wasn’t completely dark. The timestamp of the image is 18:53, that’s in the CET (GMT+1) time zone, but currently it’s CEST here (I was just lazy to adjust the clock), so the real time was 19:53. That day, the sun set at 19:31, so we were ~20 minutes after sunset.
I’m always struggling with high ISO noise reduction in RT. It’s always a choice between losing all texture, or just reducing color in the grain. Even this didn’t quite work for this particular capture. Zoomed in, the color in the grain is gone, but zoomed out it’s still there. Then again, it’s a high ISO shot and imho it’s allowed to look the part. Still a nice capture!
