Canon G10 - reducing noise?

[TB Rich]

Hi,

Firstly I'm bit of a camera noob really. It is something that interest's me and to be able to take great shots of my kids and cars etc would be fanastic. I brought the Canon G10 as it has good P&S modes as well as full manual. The results I've seen by people who know what there doing are stunning! But, I'm not there yet by a long shot.

To the point, how do I reduce the noise in my shots? I'm currently shooting on large (15MP) and superfine. What I would like to know is would reducing the size/MP used reduce the noise in the shots??

If that works it will save the effort of post processing my shots. I've been using Photoshop for many a year now and am happy with doing PP, but id rather PP was the exception and not the norm.

Any and all advice very welcomed.

[malc350]

If it's anything like the G9 it'll be noticeably noisy even above ISO 100 though you can get reasonable results up to ISO 400.

It's best to try and use 100 if poss. There are a lot of pixels in a small sensor and briefly that leads to noise issues. Malc

[RobDickinson]

TB Rich said:

Hi,

What I would like to know is would reducing the size/MP used reduce the noise in the shots??

Done properly it should reduce the noise.

As above, try and avoid using higher ISO settings, but sometimes you do need to, the downside of craming 15 million pixels into a sensor the size of a pinhead.

BTW event he canon 50D has issues with noise at 15mp that the 40D doesnt.

[VxDuncan]

Turn off in camera noise reduction and sharpening (or shot RAW), shoot full res, pull into photoshop, use something like noise ninja(other 3rd party noise removal tools are available) then resize smaller and finally sharpen to taste. Noise ninja will do a FAR better job than the camera itself (has a far more powerfull processer than the comprimise in camera, plus you have more comtrol).

All down to pixel density I'm afraid. Canon G10 has a pixel density of 34MP/cm2, while a typical DSLR has around 3MP/cm2 (down to 1.4MP/cm2 for the Nikon D3!). No matter what you do with NR the signal to noise ratio is still going to punish you.

[Simpo Two]

The megapixel race grieves me. Very few people really need 15Mp, or even 10Mp for that matter, considering the likely print sizes required.

I wish the compact makers would turn out a camera with just 5-6Mp that concentrated on real image quality and not gimmicks. I fear it may be a long wait...

[VxDuncan]

Exactly. Getting silly. Would love a Canon Powershot G9/10, but am a bit put off by the noise.

[RobDickinson]

LL though compared prints from it favorable against some MF stuff.

Not sure myself why anyone would think they want 15mp pics fro such a small sensor. How good is the glass on it?