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"Pushing" ISO and QC


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Just wondering how high an ISO rating forum members have used in their submissions which have been accepted? Before I bought my Nikon Z6 I was using a Nikon D800 and kept the ISO at 100 or at most 200 for my Alamy submissions. The Z6 is a great improvement particularly in low light situations. Two samples are on my WP Blog - link here - http://davidmcgill.co.uk/nikon-z6-first-impressions Shot at 1600ISO and 6400ISO respectively does anyone think they will pass QC in terms of noise? I use LR Classic viewing images at 100% and then making any adjustments such dust/spot  removal and levels in PS before uploading to Alamy. I do not sharpen any of my images. At 100% there is very little noticeable grain - well to my eyes anyway!

 

Thanks.

David

 

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My Canon 5D2 is pretty long in the tooth nowadays and can't handle high ISO as well as more modern cameras. Nevertheless I've had a few accepted at 3200 and 6400 (after applying NR in Lightroom), though I'm extremely careful to only upload ones that I think stand a good chance of getting through.

 

Alan

 

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David, I shoot at ISO 125 to 800 all the time, and at 1,600 occasionally. I reduce noise in LR Classic. 

 

I've not had a QC fail in a long time for noise or any reason; I have 5 stars with Alamy QC. I abandoned my beloved Nikons several years ago. Now I shoot handheld with small Sonys (RX100-5, RX100-6, a6000, RX10). 

 

So I think you're doing just fine and if anything you might be too conservative regarding noise and QC. 

 

Stay well and keep snapping.

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6 hours ago, David McGill said:

Just wondering how high an ISO rating forum members have used in their submissions which have been accepted? Before I bought my Nikon Z6 I was using a Nikon D800 and kept the ISO at 100 or at most 200 for my Alamy submissions. The Z6 is a great improvement particularly in low light situations. Two samples are on my WP Blog - link here - http://davidmcgill.co.uk/nikon-z6-first-impressions Shot at 1600ISO and 6400ISO respectively does anyone think they will pass QC in terms of noise? I use LR Classic viewing images at 100% and then making any adjustments such dust/spot  removal and levels in PS before uploading to Alamy. I do not sharpen any of my images. At 100% there is very little noticeable grain - well to my eyes anyway!

 

Thanks.

David

 

Interesting David,

 

I am still using mostly D800's, yea I know they are a bit "old" by DSLR standards.

I have been moving my ISO up and have images on Alamy shot at 3200 that have been licensed.

Mostly if needed I go to 1600 ISO on the 800's.  I think that we "old guys" tend to try to keep to the

lowest ISO possible out of habit.

 

I also believe that there is a difference in the look of a 100 ISO image VS a 1600 or 3200 ISO image

and at times the higher ISO has a better look?  I may be wrong and just basing the above on the "old"

film days....

 

Keep in mind that I spent ten years in the Soviet Union and former Soviet Union when all I had to work

with was FUJI RDP and KODAK PKL, 100 ASA to 540 (Pushed K-14).

 

Still images are about light or as we used to say "available darkness."

 

Chuck

 

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I don't think I've ever submitted anything with an ISO over 800, but I find the newer cameras let you handhold better at lower ISOs due to the lens and camera body IS. I think the question is though, where contributors have had high ISO images pass QC, is that because QC actually checked them, or were they part of a larger submission with lower ISOs and they just slipped through? Has anyone done a submission with just high ISO images?

Edited by Steve F
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Well this time  we have an example of what is unaceptable.

 

https://www.alamy.com/contributors/alamy-how-to-pass-qc.pdf

 

I've just done some test shots to see how high I'd have to go to get anywhere near this and it's higher than 3200.

 

Your mileage may differ!

 

Stay safe. 

 

🦔

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This thread piqued my interest as to how my own collection is split in terms of ISO so I decided to do some basic collection of data.

 

The split is roughly as follows: 

 

-Around 2/3 of my port has been shot at ISO 100, 200, and 400. There will be a few that are between those numbers that weren't counted, but I usually stick to full stops at the lower ISO settings. Of that split, around 1/3 again is at ISO 100. The ISO 100 and 200 photos are mostly the tripod shots, long exposures, or anything taken in very bright sun or with a wide angle, as you'd expect.

 

The remaining 1/3 of my port is split into ISO 800, 1600, 3200 and 6400 with surprisingly more taken at 1600 than 800,  but the data otherwise getting less and less as the ISO value climbs. By 6400 there is only around 1 dozen images, there are four taken at 8000 and two at 10,000. I haven't gone any higher as with my gear it is virtually impossible to produce a usable image even with PP.

 

The general trend is that the higher ISO (1600+) is perfectly OK even on my older APS-C camera as long as I've exposed to the right, which MizBrown touched on. Also noticeable is that as I've trended towards the higher ISO the prevalence of shots taken with my FF camera doesn't increase - in fact if anything they decrease as somewhat paradoxically I often use the FF camera for tripod and other low ISO work, while using the cropper for long lens and fast work.

 

I use an A99 and an A77ii which are now old tech. OP, your Z6 (and D800 possibly) would likely blow my kit out of the water for ISO noise, so you should have no issues sending images to Alamy at the higher ISOs if I can do it. 

 

In closing I should say that anything over 1600 for me does require PP to make acceptable, but not necessarily a lot. Lightroom's default NR value of 25 on the chroma noise removes almost all colour noise and instead leaves behind the subtle and quite pleasing element of "grain". It's only once the ISO really starts to climb up that I have to start to massage the image and have on occasion used selective NR masks where there are large areas of flat space which draw your eye to the noise. Also, a tip that I learned here is if you have an image that is giving you particular difficulty, do a hefty bit of NR then shrink it down to a smaller size.  Looking again at the PDF of QC fails the noise element is quite severe so there is room to play with. My one and only QC fail so far was due to noise, where I'd completely forgot to run the (ISO 800) image through NR and it had spots of chroma in the black bits, in which case Alamy quite rightly binned it.

 

BTW my photo of an emden goose at alamy ID  2C5B548  was taken on my cropper at ISO 6400.

 

 

3 hours ago, Chuck Nacke said:

 

I also believe that there is a difference in the look of a 100 ISO image VS a 1600 or 3200 ISO image

and at times the higher ISO has a better look?  I may be wrong and just basing the above on the "old"

film days....

 

 

I have often thought this too. I have some images taken at 3200 ISO that once you remove the chroma noise (which as mentioned LR basically does automatically) have a very pleasing look to them, almost like film grain. Some of it is probably down the fact that dynamic range decreases as you increase the ISO, and in some cases you get slight colour cast/shift occurring. 

Edited by Cal
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6 hours ago, Michael Ventura said:

I too have had some high ISO pass.  1600 to 3200.  I mostly shoot in the 100 to 400 range but sometimes you just need to go high.  I reduce the noise in the Adobe RAW Converter.

 

I'm confused, Michael. I have a noise reduction tool in Lightroom Classic and another in PhotoShop. What are you referring to? 🤔

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12 hours ago, David McGill said:

Two samples are on my WP Blog - link here - http://davidmcgill.co.uk/nikon-z6-first-impressions Shot at 1600ISO and 6400ISO respectively does anyone think they will pass QC in terms of noise?

 

They look pretty good at that size, but would need to see 100% crops to comment properly.

 

Mark

 

 

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29 minutes ago, Ed Rooney said:

 

I'm confused, Michael. I have a noise reduction tool in Lightroom Classic and another in PhotoShop. What are you referring to? 🤔

 

Isn't the noise reduction "engine" in AdobeRAW convertor is the same as the one in Lightroom? (Assuming you're running latest CC versions of each).

 

Mark

Edited by M.Chapman
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59 minutes ago, Ed Rooney said:

 

I'm confused, Michael. I have a noise reduction tool in Lightroom Classic and another in PhotoShop. What are you referring to? 🤔


It’s probably the same.  I access the RAW converter thru Adobe Bridge.  If I double click on a RAW file in Bridge, it will open the image in Adobe RAW converter.

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4 hours ago, David McGill said:

Mark - here is a link to Mr/Ms Squirrel at 100% - http://davidmcgill.co.uk/100-squirrel it does look a little bit soft to me.

 

 

love the title for someone getting to that page fortuitously

 

Yep that is 100% Squirrel! 

 

 

 

for upload this would be borderline for me on the noise in the green background, probably wouldn't for a marginal subject like a squirrel where i have 100s Lockdown shots 🙂  .  I would probably be more likely to be working with the other shot of mushrooms even at higher ISO, because of the lack of smooth unicolour spots. 

Edited by meanderingemu
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18 minutes ago, meanderingemu said:

 

 

love the title for someone getting to that page fortuitously

 

Yep that is 100% Squirrel! 

 

 

 

for upload this would be borderline for me on the noise in the green background, probably wouldn't for a marginal subject like a squirrel where i have 100s Lockdown shots 🙂  .  I would probably be more likely to be working with the other shot of mushrooms even at higher ISO, because of the lack of smooth unicolour spots. 

I have to see I don't see noise in the b/g but I have a very ordinary monitor. I think it would pass as-is but I might have upped the clarity a bit.

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5 hours ago, meanderingemu said:

 

 

love the title for someone getting to that page fortuitously

 

Yep that is 100% Squirrel! 

 

 

 

for upload this would be borderline for me on the noise in the green background, probably wouldn't for a marginal subject like a squirrel where i have 100s Lockdown shots 🙂  .  I would probably be more likely to be working with the other shot of mushrooms even at higher ISO, because of the lack of smooth unicolour spots. 

 

Nothing at all wrong with what little noise there is in the bg of that image. It is also adequately sharp, it doesn't look like it has been sharpened (alamy asks you to leave images unsharpened) and would look absolutely fine viewed normally with (and probably without) USM. 

 

6 minutes ago, geogphotos said:

I'm currently having a nightmare of QC failures with images shot at 100 ISO! 

 

Not for noise though, surely?

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2 minutes ago, Cal said:

 

Nothing at all wrong with what little noise there is in the bg of that image. It is also adequately sharp, it doesn't look like it has been sharpened (alamy asks you to leave images unsharpened) and would look absolutely fine viewed normally with (and probably without) USM. 

 

 

Not for noise though, surely?

 

Yep. One today for noise - where I tried to lift dark shadows. 

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