For years I have heard and even repeated the same information that has become a lie recently. And I am not even ashamed of it. When I repeated it, it was true, but not anymore. Today, it is a lie that still too many photographers believe and hold as fact.
The lie today is this:
“We should all shoot with the lowest ISO possible in our cameras to get good, noise-free photos.” Up until recently, this was a truth for me. There was no way to recover from a high ISO picture that had noise in it. Of course, there were ways to reduce the noise, but often (way too often) at the expense of image quality.
The Bicycle Thief, Halifax, ISO 8000
Many pictures became “plastic-y”, looking like plastic sheets, without any decent detail in them. All the fine details were lost, eaten up by the noise reduction process.
Halifax, ISO 8000
Hairs? Gone! Wrinkles? Gone! (although for some that may be a desired effect…). Small branches? Feather tips? Gone! The process was unusable unless you accepted to have a fair amount of noise in your picture to see that there were details in it.
Champagne cart, Halifax, ISO 8000
All in all an unacceptable situation. And this was the reality for over two decades of digital photography. It was nice to show this off as “digital grain” as if this was somehow part of the process.
Pilot in Halifax Harbour, ISO 2200
Then came softwares like Piccure Plus (now defunct as the creator has passed away, apparently), Topaz Labs with several programs to reduce noise, camera shake and other artifacts. All were wonderful solutions to a bad picture until AI came along.
Boardwalk, Halifax, ISO 4000
Artificial Intelligence is a way to make computers look intelligent, without them having physical intelligence. It remains a computer program, albeit with an enormous database of methods at its disposal. It looks as if something intelligent is at work after all.
Boardwalk, Halifax, ISO 8000
In the case of Adobe’s AI Denoise, the “intelligence” is simply a better way to do computational operations, as opposed to doing something intelligent. AI Denoise is by far the best weapon against ISO noise in any picture today.
Fresnel lens, Maritime Museum, Halifax, ISO 8000
The pictures in this post all have ISO values ranging from 2200 to 8000. Anything beyond 8000 becomes unusable too quickly and is barely recoverable for me.
Maritime Museum, Halifax, ISO 8000
High ISO? As Phil Collins sang in 1983, I don’t care anymore!
Until next time…