Help with noise

[jeepdogg]

Calling all HDR photographers, I have a question for you. I recently started trying HDR's and have noticed that when I combine the pictures, I tend to have heavy amounts of noise, especially in the blue sky. I have attached 2 examples of the noise with the original untouched picture. Even when I don't go so aggresive with the sliders, I have similar amounts of noise. I took these pictures with a Canon 7D at ISO 100 on a tripod with a 18-135mm lense at 20 mm F22 aperture in raw format. I converted all 3 photos to tiffs then used photomatix to make the HDR. Now I do use noise reducing software, and I combine the HDR with an original photo so I can reduce the noise and still get a good final picture. I am curious if everyone gets this noise or am I doing something wrong, or do I have some faulty equipment. So please everyone chime in and tell me what your experiences are with this situation.

[_Provo_]

#1 remember anything that comes out of photomatix has noise.
Sometimes using the reduce noise option when merging your exposed images
will help to reduce noise.

Also check out the slider info I have provided
And 3rd I use noise reduction software Noiseware , Nik tools ,topaz in-focus
for the majority of the time I use noiseware I find it best at what it does and has so many options

[jessea]

I "clean" my raw shots with DXO first:noise correction is one of the many things it does(according to what I read,it has not been surpassed yet in this matter).It's done automatically if you want it to be.This is very convenient with very underexposed shots.I generate DNG files out of DXO which can feed directly PHOTOMATIX which treats them as RAW files.For you,check if your raw converter can clean any noise or try DXO for free for one-month.

[KU]

i suspect something else is up. with iso100 and f22, you should have little noise unless they are real long exposures. do the original 3 RAW files have a lot of noise? the HDR process does increase noise, but it shouldn't be so severe and uniform like in photo #1. maybe you can show us the 3 exposures from #1 and we can dig a little deeper into the issue?
also, you shouldn't need to blend an original with the final HDR, although in some cases it is necessary. after the photomatix conversion, you are saving to a 16-bit tiff?

[jeepdogg]

I agree that it appears that the noise is very uniform. I will upload the 3 different exposures, because looking at them, it almost appears as though there is noise in the pictures. How should I upload the files because they are 23 to 28 mb in size as raw files? Oh yea, and thanks for the help everybody.

[KU]

Free File Hosting was used for the most recent HDR challenge and it worked well. maybe ZIP them and try that, sorry not too up on the latest hosting sites, but i know there are many options if you do a search.

[rbritt1268]

Maybe convert them to a .tiff first to reduce size a bit, then zip and up-load? I've used Hotfile.com and it worked well.

[jessea]

I used hotfile.com as well,but I would advise to upload the raw files WITHOUT any manipulation(except zip them if you want).

[jeepdogg]

I hope I did this right. I zipped the three files and placed them at:

2010-12-16.zipx - HDR 3 exposure pictures - Dedicated Web Hosting Service

I appreciate the help everyone, just let me know what you think.

[KU]

Originally Posted by jeepdogg

I hope I did this right. I zipped the three files and placed them at:

2010-12-16.zipx - HDR 3 exposure pictures - Dedicated Web Hosting Service

I appreciate the help everyone, just let me know what you think.

seems that you need winzip or bitzipper to open the file, neither of which is available on a mac to my knowledge. thoughts anyone?

edit: you can download winzip for a mac, but you need OSX 10.6. I only have 10.5.8.