Too much noise at low ISO

[Picturegal]

I have a 60D and am getting a lot of noise in the sky even at 200 ISO.  Does anyone else have this problem?

[Skirball]

Are you zooming into a 100%?  There's always going to be some level of noise in any digital picture, and it's subjective to say what is a lot of noise and what isn't.  But in general you're 60D shouldn't have any noticable level of noise, especially in a blue sky, at ISO 200 when viewed at a normal size.

Can you post an example?

[hsbn]

Even at low ISO, you'll see good chunck of noise if you use High Tone Priority.

[cicopo]

The sky was noisy on images from my 7D at 100% or even 75% but you don't print at that high a magnification so it wasn't a real issue in real world terms.

[Picturegal]

Canon support suggested it might be because I had the "Auto Lighting Optimizer" feature set to "Strong".  I didn't even realize that setting existed, but I change it to "none".  Unfortunately, I haven't had a blue sky to photograph since I made the change, so I can't tell yet if it helped.   Is that what you mean by High Tone Priority, or is that a different setting?

[hsbn]

They're 2 different things. One used to protect the highlight and the other used to lift the shadow. But both of them make image some what noisy because it is boosted via in-camera-post-processing.

[Picturegal]

OK, I'll check that one out too.  Thanks.  I prefer to do my own processing in Lightroom.

[HDCamTeam]

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@Picturegal wrote:

Canon support suggested it might be because I had the "Auto Lighting Optimizer" feature set to "Strong".  I didn't even realize that setting existed, but I change it to "none".  Unfortunately, I haven't had a blue sky to photograph since I made the change, so I can't tell yet if it helped.   Is that what you mean by High Tone Priority, or is that a different setting?

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Hi,

Auto Lighting Optimizer and Highlight Tone Priority are useful functions, but it's very likely to get noiser images (in dark areas) if you enable any of them. Especially if you had ALO set to "strong".

Shoot the same scene with and without any of those functions enabled and you'll see the difference.

When they're well used they can give you great result, but you have to be careful to avoid excesive noise increase in dark areas.

Regards.

[Stoneysnapper]

I had noise issues at ISO 200 and 400 on my 7D. I had ran comparisons with another 7D and profiled the results in Noise Ninja and at every ISO from 100 to 3200 the profile results were within 5% of each other, except at 200 and 400 where my camera was some 40% higher in noise index rating than the other 7D. This was really noticeable admittedly at 100% however viewing at 100% shouldn't make it less acceptable. I put the query to Canon and the camera went into one of their service centres. It was certainly improved when it came back.

[Picturegal]

When I look in my manual for  Highlight Tone Priority settings, they seem to be for movie shots, not stills.