Another noise reection

[liverpix]

I've just had another photo rejected for noise. Photo taken on a Sony Nex 5N at ISO 400. Last photo to be rejected for noise was taken on the RX100, 5N has bigger sensor.

 

What do you think ? 

 

https://postimg.cc/image/yam9zvrl7/

[M.Chapman]

Not sure if noise was the cause, but something seems to have robbed you of critical sharpness on the monkey fur. The young monkey fur especially lacks some detail to my eyes. QC may have liked the heads of both monkeys to be sharp, which would need slightly more DOF than this shot has, sharpest point seems to be adult monkey's hands. I'd have though SoLD might have been a more sensible categorisation. If I downsize to 17MB it looks quite a bit better.

 

Did you start from RAW or in camera jpg? I often find starting from RAW gives a cleaner result than the in camera jpg.

 

Mark 

[Katie]

Not sure about noise, but I wouldn't call it professionally sharp. It has the sort of blurring of detail that I'd associate with a mobile phone shot, so it wouldn't be suitable for use in higher resolution forms. The sharpest point of focus also seems to be in the wrong place. I would assume Alamy would expect a better sharpness for an outdoor image, but may have selected the wrong rejection reason.

[John Mitchell]

The monkey image doesn't look particularly noisy to me, but I'm no expert on this stuff. Downsizing might indeed have done the trick. I have 100's of images on Alamy taken with a Sony NEX-3. Noise was never really a problem with this camera. However, I did have a couple of noise failures when I started using the NEX-3. I believe they were mainly the fault of the free (and inadequate) Sony RAW processing software that I was using at the time. I also initially had a few "soft and lacking definition" failures with the NEX-3 and soon discovered that the AF has a tendency to back-focus. You have to be really careful. I recently upgraded from a NEX-6 (very good camera) to the Sony a6000, and the 24MP sensor is a huge improvement. Images show virtually zero noise. AF is super accurate as well.

[liverpix]

1 hour ago, M.Chapman said:

Not sure if noise was the cause, but something seems to have robbed you of critical sharpness on the monkey fur. The young monkey fur especially lacks some detail to my eyes. QC may have liked the heads of both monkeys to be sharp, which would need slightly more DOF than this shot has, sharpest point seems to be adult monkey's hands. I'd have though SoLD might have been a more sensible categorisation. If I downsize to 17MB it looks quite a bit better.

 

Did you start from RAW or in camera jpg? I often find starting from RAW gives a cleaner result than the in camera jpg.

 

Mark 

I was shooting in jpeg. I don''t think it's noisy, nether do you  it seems but Alamy seems to think so for some reason.

 

[wiskerke]

That big round hole just to the left of the big monkey's elbow, is that by way of watermark or was that in your upload?

I agree that there's a lot of smearing of detail going on. Just never trust anything but RAW. Especially when repetitive detail like fur; hair or foliage is involved. So no noise, but obvious artefacts I would say.

 

wim

 

edit: there's another blank hole along the top edge.

[liverpix]

16 minutes ago, wiskerke said:

That big round hole just to the left of the big monkey's elbow, is that by way of watermark or was that in your upload?

I agree that there's a lot of smearing of detail going on. Just never trust anything but RAW. Especially when repetitive detail like fur; hair or foliage is involved. So no noise, but obvious artefacts I would say.

 

wim

 

edit: there's another blank hole along the top edge.

Yes, I noticed the circle on the left too (after I got the rejection) - I think I must have used the wrong spot healing brush. The circles were not on the original photo but on the copy I sent in.

[wiskerke]

3 minutes ago, liverpix said:

Yes, I noticed the circle on the left too (after I got the rejection) - I think I must have used the wrong spot healing brush. The circles were not on the original photo but on the copy I sent in.

 

Those could very well be the reason for the rejection.

 

wim

[liverpix]

9 minutes ago, wiskerke said:

 

Those could very well be the reason for the rejection.

 

wim

Maybe, but that should come under blemishes and not noise.

[wiskerke]

1 minute ago, liverpix said:

Maybe, but that should come under blemishes and not noise.

Extremely large noise ;-)

You could always ask.

I still think the hair and especially the faces look quite smeared. How is your noise setting?

And why not RAW?

 

wim

[John Mitchell]

I think that over-manipulation or blemishes would have been better reasons to give for failure. If you had cleaned up the two "holes" and perhaps downsized, my bet is that the image would have passed QC. That said, as others have suggested, RAW is best.

[Niels Quist]

If it is the Sony RX100 - and with a high ISO setting - the automatic noise reduction can produce terrible results. If you shoot in RAW you can handle this, even at low light (if you don't use a higher ISO setting than necessary). So much worth the time to get the hang of, will be rewarding.

[Stephen Lloyd]

8 hours ago, liverpix said:

Maybe, but that should come under blemishes and not noise.

In fairness, that spot is about the size on the entrance to the Mersey tunnel and should have been identified before submission. It is more than enough to earn rejection and would display to Alany you really had not checked the image. You must have been removing something big? 

[ChrisC]

8 hours ago, liverpix said:

Maybe, but that should come under blemishes and not noise.

Unfortunately, you are splitting hairs, the fact is with two large holes in your image, it is unsaleable.

 

There are images on Alamy that aren't as sharp as that, but I suspect they are from many years ago, but as Katie said, it's not professionally sharp, somebody I guess my use an image  as (non) sharp as that as, for a slide show, but it's not great. 

 

I admire your tenacity, as you keep battling on, but you really need to get a copy of Lightroom or some other software and shoot in Raw and be careful with your editing, otherwise this is going to go on forever, almost as it is now.

 

I may be wrong, but I am possibly over critical of mine, if I see an image that isn't 100% sharp at 100% in Lightroom, being slack with the healing brush, or just general sharpness won't work with Alamy's criteria I'm afraid.

 

 

[spacecadet]

2 hours ago, Niels Quist said:

If it is the Sony RX100 - and with a high ISO setting - the automatic noise reduction can produce terrible results. If you shoot in RAW you can handle this, even at low light (if you don't use a higher ISO setting than necessary). So much worth the time to get the hang of, will be rewarding.

Only 400ISO- it does have that plastic look I now see in my old jpeg originals, but I'd have expected it to pass. The fail is for the spotting mistake. Arguably the spot is SoLD!

OP, it's a simple fact that RAWs are sharper at any ISO. It's just that it may only make enough difference for QC in extreme cases - high ISO, wide aperture, incipient camera shake.