🤷 Do you mean you found them dirty?
You have some stuff on your lens, there are quite a few spots
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Looks like sensor dust, not lens dust to me.
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A good way to tell if it’s lens dust or sensor dust is to see if it moves dramatically if you turn the focus barrel, provided that the front elements rotate when you do so. Edit, looking at the metadata, it does seem like the lens front element rotates.
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Could you point out some? I couldn’t find them…
noise.bother.nef.xmp (14.8 KB) darktable 3.3.0+2112~g04713cbba
About the noise: I think you should add a little bit of noise reduction. I noticed that it is visible, in a for me unpleasant way, in the black building. Using denoise (profiled) → wavelets auto and upping the strength just a bit solved this. Don’t see the need for a new camera.
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What I mainly noticed (after the spots on the sensor), was the exposure correction needed: >2EV on top of the +1EV in-camera… That would contribute to the visibility of the (shadow) noise…
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I did, but I used non-local means and reduced strength a bit to get rid of the plastic look.
But now that you mentioned, wavelets auto maybe does a better job (in terms of taste) because it resembles grain from high ISO films.
Yeah, maybe I should think twice when doing ETTR, at least with this camera (that seems to be rather noisy - Nikon D7000)
Don’t fight it. Embrace it, even more, exaggerate it and make it into the whole series in your first art exhibition 
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That’s a good perspective, thanks. Would you mind sharing your sidecar file?
You can load my JPEG as a sidecar file. LUT comes from this set (they are not shared within XMP or JPEG) — Free LUTs – ON1
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Used RT here, I also don’t suppress all the noise.
Spots removed with GIMP
DSC_7146_RT.jpg.out.pp3 (14.4 KB)
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Hello Gustavo, I own a Nikon D7000 as well, for years, and it is in no way a noisy camera. I think the noise in your picture is caused by the way how you exposed this scene. Loading your nef in Art shows a very dark picture - way too dark in my opinion. Compensating dark pictures always amplifies noise.
My default exposure compensation setting is -1/3 EV and I don’t use that ETTR technique, just plain old aperture priority. My photos show a bit of noise at standard ISO (100), mainly in the skies, which is easily corrected in any raw converter, just a slight touch of NR will do.
So don’t sell your D7000, it’s really a great camera!
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Still have my D7000, intend to use it as a backup with long telephoto for my railroad walkabouts. It does present noise in low light situations, but I’ve found it to be easily correctable. I think its performance is precisely what ETTR is about, exposing to put highlights as high as possible in order to pull more of the scene out of the shadows. I think your +1/3 EV technique is spot-on, especially when one can’t spend quality time doing metering of a scene.
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I believe you mean +1/3 EV, right?
I think that’s what I’m doing: I have exposure compensation set to +1 EV. Then I spot meter the brightest area of the scene, then reframe and shoot.
But I’ll revise the histograms to see if I’m doing anything wrong. I was used to a Canon 5D and it is just a couple of days I started using the D7k.
Thanks anyway for the advice on this model, and I’m glad to know it is worth to keep it.
Dust on the entrance aperture of the lens should not be visible at all (it is just vignetting and scattering light), dust on the detector is projected sharp. Dust inside is a different issue.
Hermann-Josef
Small aperture shots are very sensitive to lens dust.
Not right! I expose minus 1/3 of a stop by default, in order to avoid blown-out highlights. Using raws I am practically always able to keep those highlights (think white clouds, white clothes) detailed and not washed-out.
So you meter the brightest area using spot. That means that those areas will be well exposed, and you add 1EV to make the scene a bit brighter. That also means that you don’t care about the shadow parts in your scene. In my view this is the very reason why your original photo turns out quite underexposed when opening in Art with a neutral profile!
Using spot-metering is quite a tricky thing, because you must be very well aware what you are metering and how that compares to the rest of the scene.
A thing I forgot to mention in my first reaction was that the Expose-to-the-Right technique implies that you do that while shooting and not in post-processing. So take a shot, look at your histogram and change exposure compensation until the histogram touches nearly the right side.
I nearly always use matrix or center meting with named minus 1/3EV to get good results.
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