Are any of the raw softwares particularly well suited for dealing with underexposed shots? I’m doing night photography with a Nikon D2Hs and f/4 glass.
Hopefully some 2.8 glass arrives tomorrow and I’m planning to get a new body in 2 or 3 months as well as a couple fast primes but none of that helps the shots I took tonight.
The question is, which kind of shots are you doing at night or “underexposed”
Astro, tripod vs hand held, city scenes, wild animals at night?
IMHO night shots not necessarily mean underexposed. Even astro photography can cause over exposure.
You say, you are getting a new body, but I wonder, which one…
I had to look up what kind of cam D2Hs was. By its time for sure a brillant cam, but made for night? Not so sure.
Night shots is one of my specialities too. A lense with f2.8 (and maybe OS) is good to start but also depends on scene and focal length.
Comming to your question, I’m not aware of any specific raw converter for low light. I am using darktable for years now and I am missing nothing (just you got to learn it). You may browse category ‘play raw’ and find loads of good examples (actually for several raw convs).
I just looked up the D2Hs at Bill Claff’s photontophotos.net, about the same PDR as my old NIkon D50. I had to do a lot of denoising to make low light work with it, so I think what you need is a raw processor with decent denoising. RawTherapee or darktable should do what you need. darktable in particular offers profiled denoising, which uses profiles specific to the camera model. I don’t know if your particular camera is supported…
I did three recent low light shoots. One was of a small cascade in the setting sun (still above the horizon), one was of the sunset / geese on water in civil twilight and one was a church with some meager interior illumination that I’m hoping to pull the stained glass from. All three are handheld; I’m shooting incidental to family trips.
I started watching Bruce Williams’s darktable tutorials - they are phenomenally helpful!m
I’m hoping to find a D4s on the used market in a couple months but will also consider a D4 or D3s. I’m also slowly investing in lenses - two f/2.8 lenses should arrive tomorrow (a 14 mm and a 70-210mm, no stabilization for either though.
With Bruce’s Videos you are well set. Enjoy and I suggest you start even with the first ones. Even they are obsolete, but you learn the basic technique and GUI philosophy, if I may say so. That will be helpful in my opinion.
All scenarios you describe above, you will definitely achieve pleasing results with dt (provided they are well shot in terms of cam parameter handling)
In the range of those cams you are looking after, you will also find the D750 2nd hand, which I would highly recommend to consider. It is a beast in terms of ISO. Check “Play Raw”, you will find several, I am sure.
Besides AF accuracy, I like Sigma ART lenses. I own 35/1.4 and 20/1.4, as well as for my APSC cams the 18.35/1.8. In terms of glas they are quite good.
I find ART (and RawTherapee as its base) much better at noise reduction than darktable (and most of other software). It is really much easier to use and it provides me better result. In darktable there are multiple dedicated noise reduction modules and some others modules which are also recommended to use to remove noise, but none of them gave me the same level of result when I was testing it. Honestly, I find it too tedious and complicated for no real reason/no benefit.
I recommend you to try ART, it has everything for raw editing (besides good noise reduction). Very powerful and easy to use.
I also join the recommendation for D750. It is one the best in full-frame world (as of today) in terms of high ISO quality and dynamic range, and in general just excellent camera. I use mine universally all the time and really couldn’t be happier.
If money is tight, I would suggest to take a look at D600, it has the same sensor as the D750 and with night shots probably you wouldn’t need improved AF etc (on the other hand, the D750 has the flippy screen which may be useful if tripod-mounted). It’s stupidly cheap thanks to the bad name it has acquired a few years ago with the imaginary issue of sensor dust stains.
I used to have one before my current D810 and I did a lot of comparison with the D750 that a friend of mine used to have; I could see no differences at all in real life usage.
About the software anyway, I agree with the others, all the software we discuss in here are excellent with regards to noisy shots. In my own experience, I have always used DT since moving away from Lightroom a few years ago, and the latest updates to the profiled denoise modules have improved dramatically the results. In particular I have this as my default denoise approach where I simply remove chroma noise and leave the grainy appearance (e.g., avoidiing the smooth-waxy look of smartphone jpegs):
+1 on the D750, probably right now one of the best deals for a wide dynamic range camera. And, F mount…
If low-light is really a main thing for you, I’d also suggest looking into the Z 6. Its IBIS lets me shoot hand-held down to about 1/10sec with a bit of meditation, something I could never do below 1/30sec with my older cameras, even with in-lens VR. Denoising is just after-the fact mitigation; getting more light is the real solution…
Sensor-wise, I think D750 = Z 5 (FSI), while D780 = Z 6 & Z 6 II (BSI) which give you a little bit extra shadow range above ISO 800 (~0.5 EV?) if you go by Bill Claff’s measurements already mentioned…
Note that there are some preprocessing tricks combined with taking multiple shots one can use to improve DR:
If you have enough light to achieve good shutter speeds when bracketing handheld, HDRMerge
Same for bracketing when tripod-mounted in lower light
In some scenarios, you may need to move to burst stacking with something like Tim Brooks’ implementation of Google HDR+ - at one point I hacked together a variation that output a DNG file instead of doing the debayering/tonemapping/colorspace conversion, that MIGHT have been merged officially???
I’ve started experimenting with this as well and so far the results are really impressive. I like that with the resulting DNG you can just develop the photo like normal in Darktable too so your workflow doesn’t change.
@mek42 sorry if that is redundant information now, but you should also check, whether your body of choice is supported by your software of choice.
For darktable, there is this information available and indeed the lovely dtdocs