EOS R10 Indoor sports pics are grainy and blurry

[Agi2025]

Hello, 

I'm in desperate need of some advise, please. I was taking High School wrestling pictures that turned out super grainy and blurry and would love some help. A couple of pictures attached. My setup was the following: 

Canon R10 with a 70-200 lens. TV setting. I was experimenting with the shutter speed between 250 and 500 and different ISO levels. When I used a higher shutter speed (1/1000) it was making the images very dark and even bumping up ISO the image looked dark.

I didn't use a monopod but had the camera on my knees for support. I will use a monopod for the next tournament. 

I was shooting in RAW but it wouldn't let me upload the RAW picture despite a CR3 file so I had to rename it to a jpeg.

Appreciate any help I could get to have better quality pictures next time :-). 

Thank you in advance for taking the time to provide some feedback. 

Agi

[Agi2025]

Thank you LeeP for your feedback!

[Agi2025]

Thanks John! Yes, will be focusing on exposure meter at next event. 

[Agi2025]

Hi Tom,

I had noise reduction enabled. Below is an example of EXIF info:

Canon EOS R10, 70 mm, f/3.2, 1/250, ISO 4000 EXP - 0.7

Thank you!

[Agi2025]

Trying once more to share with Dropbox 🙂

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/81r4r4n7x2x023pnk1lak/Canon-Example-2.jpg?rlkey=r8bscymuvro3vw2r0tnqv...

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/im7xr2ps8xmg9wdg2lh79/Canon-Example-4.CR3?rlkey=zt4b3qdh8wmnjf0nqjegx...

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ivr6paniwa11u61s7r34f/Canon-Example-6.CR3?rlkey=5f2jlehpxlrq7lt73rp20...

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/eyrjmxv6xkrtrnr7a4guz/Canon-Example-3.CR3?rlkey=qxnbynd27cwdhygmru6z3...

[p4pictures]

A low light environment and the need for an action freezing shutter speed means fast lenses and higher ISO values. You already mentioned using the f/2.8 version of the 70-200mm, so that's a good start. If you use a fixed ISO value with Tv then you do need to either keep watching for a blinking aperture value, or make use of the safety shift feature of your camera in the custom functions.  

If using Tv mode, and the lens aperture value starts blinking this tells you the lens aperture cannot be set to a value for a good exposure, and you should adjust the ISO value. 

If using Tv mode, you can enable safety shift in the camera custom functions, and this will either adjust the chosen shutter speed, or ISO value when the lens aperture cannot be set. I think of it as a helping hand to get me reasonable exposures when I'm not able to fully pay attention to the flashing aperture. I suggest enabling safety shift with ISO. 

As to the noise in your photos, this is not particularly bad, but could certainly benefit from using noise reduction in your post processing of the RAW images. Canon DPP is free to use and does a good job to reduce noise but sometimes I need to increase the noise reduction from the default DPP settings. Secondly Photoshop or Lightroom has the Denoise capability and this is also rather effective to reduce the noise. There are other applications like Topz Denoise that do a similar job. 

I always work with the idea that a good sharp picture with a bit of noise is infinitely better than a clean blurry one!

[jrhoffman75]

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@Agi2025 wrote:

Hi Tom,

I had noise reduction enabled. Below is an example of EXIF info:

Canon EOS R10, 70 mm, f/3.2, 1/250, ISO 4000 EXP - 0.7

Thank you!

---

Is there a reason why you dialed in -0.7 exposure compensation? If the EC was 0 you could have a lower ISO.

[jrhoffman75]

---

@Agi2025 wrote:

Hello, 

I'm in desperate need of some advise, please. I was taking High School wrestling pictures that turned out super grainy and blurry and would love some help. A couple of pictures attached. My setup was the following: 

Canon R10 with a 70-200 lens. TV setting. I was experimenting with the shutter speed between 250 and 500 and different ISO levels. When I used a higher shutter speed (1/1000) it was making the images very dark and even bumping up ISO the image looked dark.

I didn't use a monopod but had the camera on my knees for support. I will use a monopod for the next tournament. 

I was shooting in RAW but it wouldn't let me upload the RAW picture despite a CR3 file so I had to rename it to a jpeg.

Appreciate any help I could get to have better quality pictures next time :-). 

Thank you in advance for taking the time to provide some feedback. 

Agi

---

Hi Agi.

I downloaded the .CR3 files and looked at them using Canon DPP4.

I have a few thoughts.

1. I see you are shooting in RAW, which is good. If you are using photo editing software my suggestion is turn off all in-camera image processing settings. You selected the highest setting for High ISO Noise Reduction. Noise reduction works by smoothing the pixels and frequently you can get the "plastic" look which I think your images show. 

2. Your images show negative exposure compensation. Is there a reason you selected that? Setting zero EC will allow a lower ISO.

3. Some of the images are at an aperture smaller than f/2.8. If you aren't trying to adjust for increased depth of field use f/2.8.

I will import the images into Lightroom and see what I can do.

[jrhoffman75]

This image shows that you applied -1 EC and Lightroom Auto adjust added .84 stops of exposure. If 0 EC was used you could have had 1 stop lower ISO.

But LrC did a good job with noise reduction and sharpness looks good.

Next time try shooting Tv and Auto ISO. In your setup menu you can set a maximum ISO of 6400. That should clean up well in software.

[pcs1]

If you go from -1 exp. comp. to 0 I'd expect to have to use a stop higher ISO? I often shoot -1 to lower ISO one stop.

[p4pictures]

If you underexpose the photos then you move more of the image data in to the shadows, where there is less gradation, more noise and no and way to lift the data back out. It's better to get the exposure right, or let the camera try rather than intentionally underexpose. 

One challenge is that if you manually set the ISO to a high value, then set the shutter speed to a value needed to freeze motion, then the only thing left for the camera is aperture, and when the lens is wide open the result is underexposed shots. I suggest you try setting the ISO to say 1600, set your shutter speed as you need and then set the camera custom functions so that safety shift with ISO is enabled. One of your RAW images was ISO 12800, so adjust the ISO auto range to allow that as normally it is set for 100 - 6400 by default. Safety shift can only use the same range as ISO Auto.