Digital Imaging and Photography → [Help] Noise in sky photos

Having trouble with extreme noise showing in my landscape photos especially when the sky has a pink cast to it. Any suggestions? I shoot with a Canon 20D.

If you shoot at ISO 1600, you are bound to get noise in your photos. To avoid it, you have several options:

1) Reduce the ISO setting.
2) Shoot RAW and use the noise-reduction options built into RAW converters.
3) Use noise reduction software (NeatImage, NoiseNinja).
4) If you are looking for value for money, get Noel's DSLR tools actions; they do a great job of reducing chroma and luminance noise for little money.

EDIT: Need to type/post faster...sorry for the duplicate.

It's a product of the ISO being set to 1600.

Noise is an unavoidable by-product of increasing the gain (ISO) of the sensor.

You'll either have to work with a lower ISO or use a program like Noise Ninja to remove it.

The 20D does very well up to ISO 800 but above that gets noisy:

»www.dpreview.com/reviews ··· ge20.asp

Is there a reason why you shot at F/10? You could have shot at the lens' minimum aperture and probably managed to get the ISO down to 400 and still maintain a good shutter speed.

Much like simpfan742 my first thought was why you were shooting with the settings listed.

EDIT: ignore my blather about slowing the shutter -- helps to look at the full size pic instead of the thumbnail before drawing conclusions.

Thanks for the feedback. How dumb am I. Totally missed that my ISO was on 1600.

What RAW converter do you use?
In Adobe Camera Raw, you can go a long way by setting Chroma Noise Reduction to 50 and Luminance Noise Reduction to 75 in a picture like yours. Reducing the sharpness level to zero in ACR will also help - ACR's sharpneing is pretty aggressive when compared to the several options available in photoshop.

Not dumb. Just learning, as I am.

Under no circumstances is anyone dumb who looks at their photos, wants to improve them, and is willing to openly ask questions.

This is just one more thing of many that you'll think about in the future while making photos. We've all done stuff like this and will continue to do so.

Don't feel bad... Counting all my Canon dSLRs over the years, I've taken about 75,000 digital photos. To this day occasionally I forget to set the ISO setting properly.

Whatever noise reduction you do use, try to remove color noise first, before turning up the luminance noise reduction. This can result in a much smoother looking image without obvious loss of detail. It's amazing how just removing color noise can improve the look of an image with little downside.

-Noel