Thank you all for the suggestions. I guess I was just being silly. The shot was very underexposed, and I didn't do any compensations, I simply raised the brightness in Canons apps before saving it out as a TIF.

Still very early in the learning phases, and I find it awesome that all of you are so patient. Thanks again. :)

-Melen

Thanks Danny. The beta plugin works well, tho it doesn't help the noise (actually seems to make the noise more monochrome).

I think that this particular problem may just be that it's underexposed.

But it begs the question... Is this the type of noise I can expect when doing night shots as well? I've seen some suprisingly clean night time shots with the XT and the kit lens.

Thanks!

-Melen

I'm such a dunce sometimes. I never thought of upsizing in Canons apps. Just tried it (from 3456 x 2304 to 6000x4000) and there was suprisingly little degradation. Nifty. Course, first I have to start taking shots worth printing ::chuckle::

I still find Lightroom really slow, even the newest Beta. I like the idea, but I'm an impatient person sometimes.

-Melen

Hi Lew and Danny,

Thanks for the responses. I will definatly try that with some bracketed shots. Definatly this shot was underexposed, no doubt about that.

I'm using Photoshop CS2, tho to be honest I don't know what profile I have loaded. Most likely whatever was installed by default. I have to confess that I start getting confused when it comes to the profiles, so I doubt I've ever changed it.

I hear you on the kit lens. I'm really disappointed that I didn't buy the body and a seperate good lens. The purchase was somewhat spontaneous (and I always get myself into trouble buying things that way)! In good light it can produce some amazing photos tho.

Thanks!

-Melen

Happy Birthday :)

Hi Chris,

To be honest, any code-related protection can be outdone. For example, lets say you used a Flash gallery software with no way of right clicking on the picture and saving it. Still, one could take a screen shot of their browser window (hitting PrntScrn in Windows) and then pasting that into Photoshop and cropping out everything but the picture.

Really the only way that I can see that would solve anything is to watermark the crap out of it.That's still not 100% foolproof, but most thieves won't be willing to take the amount of time needed to get rid of the watermarks.

I'm just barely an amateur photographer, but I've worked professionally for over 10 years in the ISP business. I've had a few customers ask this very question. To be honest, if you want to be 100% safe, the only thing you can do is not post them. Other than that the only advice I can give is present them via Flash (or some other way that prevents right clicking and saving) and watermark them.

I know, it really sucks to have to worry about art thieves!!

-Melen

Hi all,

Just to answer the questions:

• Yes, it's a 100% crop

• I shoot in RAW, and yes it was converted to jpeg in photoshop.. However, if I view the RAW image, there's really no difference that the eye can see (what I mean is, the level of noise is pretty much exactly the same, jpeg compression didn't make it any worse than it already was). Saving it out as Tif (for this particular image) ends up being just about the same

Thanks

-Melen

Awesome idea! This has me thinking :)

:) Thanks! I admit it, tho, I don't post a whole lot, so easily forgettable ::chuckle::

Not sure why I wasn't going to post this anywhere.

::pout:: Mine was the 8th of October :)

Happy Birthday all those with one close to now :)

-Melen

Hi danob,

Thank you for that. I have been using mirror lockup and this has helped somewhat.

What does the shutter-curtain sync do, btw? I've been confused by this. What should I set it to for long exposures?

Thanks again!

Thank you all for the responses.

I did notice the noise reduction option and was wondering how that worked. I'll give that a go and see if that takes care of most of the noise.

I just thought at iso 100, even at 20-30 seconds, that it should be relatively noise free. I need to do some night shots and see how bad off it'll be.

Is any of this, noise-wise, related to the fact that I'm using the lens that came with the kit or is it only the camera?

Hi Richard,

Thank you for all the suggestions, this is great!

I have to admit, despite much reading, there's alot of overwhelming information out there, but this will definatly give me something to start looking for.