Last month, prior to holding a landscape workshop in the White Mountain National Forest, I camped out to explore/scout a new section of this enormous region. The first night while sitting by my campfire I looked up and noticed how the warm light from my fire colored the surrounding trees which framed the starry sky and I decided to shoot it. In order to do this I needed a fast shutter speed to record the stars as points instead of short streaks. To do this I used my widest lens, a fisheye, wide open at f/2.8, and ISO 2200 on my Nikon D300. The resulting composition was good, not WOW shot, but heh, I had nothing else to do.
Now the sad part, when I finished shooting I broke one of my sacred rules which is to always return my camera to ‘my personal base settings’ after each shoot. Well, the next morning I woke up to shoot sunrise at the lake next to my campsite. That sunrise shoot yielded some pretty good stuff but later, after checking into the hotel and reviewing my captures on my laptop, my draw dropped as I realized I shot everything that morning at ISO 2200 instead of a nice clean ISO 200 setting. Well, fortunately just before I left I downloaded the latest version of Topaz’s world class noise removal software, DeNoise 4 to my laptop. I ran my favored captures through DeNoise 4 and low and behold Topaz saved the day - or rather my morning shoot.
Topaz DeNoise is one of several Photoshop (and Aperture) plugins the company offers. I am a big fan of their products, especially Simplicity, Adjust and Detail. I am not one of those photographers that loads his computer will all the latests plugins. I find Photoshop adequate for most of my needs along with Photomatix for HDR’s. Less than a year ago when I discovered DeNoise I did several tests against Noise Ninja, my noise reduction software of choice since 2005. I don’t need to use high ISO much and when I do it is rarely more than ISO 800, but I need NR for those times. Earlier this year when I upgraded my computer from PC to Mac I did not even bother loading Noise Ninja since DeNoise made many of my ISO 1600 test shots look like ISO 200. I never did any ISO 2200 tests since I never needed to shoot that high until that trip. I can’t say I was able to get ISO 2200 to look like ISO 200 but the results were very acceptable. If you are looking for a good noise reduction program I strongly suggest you take DeNoise for a test drive. Use some of your own captures and play with the settings to get a feel for it, then decide for yourself. Never just buy something because you read a good review, always do your own testing when possible. With DeNoise 4, I think you will find this to be the best of the bunch. Of course first and foremost, always use the lowest ISO settings you can get away with since that will yield not just the cleanest result but the greatest dynamic range.
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