Will Rebel 7ti take better photos at higher ISO than 5ti?

[tenofhearts12]

I like the rebel line of cameras and I am considering purchasing the 7ti. My 5ti takes great photos at up to 400 ISO before photos start gettin noisy. I am curious if the 7ti takes better photos at higher iso than the 5ti? Would be nice to be able to get really decent photos at 800 iso. Would I be better off with a higher end Canon camera? Thanks!

[ebiggs1]

As a general rule, any newer model will out perform older cameras.  At least they should or why would anyone buy them?

I never had or used a T5i but I have played with the T7i.  It is an amazing Rebel. Clearly the best Rebel so far. I could be happy owning one.

I would certainly expect you to be able to use ISO's much higher than 800.  However, I don't know what level of print you desire.  Do you shoot Raw format and post process and edit?  You should.  You just might be surprised in your T5i if you do.

[tenofhearts12]

Thanks for the response. I have just tried a few photos in RAW and used the RAW photo options in Paint Shop Pro and I am probably doing something wrong account I did not notice any improvement over the JPEG after adjustments to both formats. Could be the limitations of the programs' ability to deal with the RAW photo or my lack of experience or both 🙂

[ebiggs1]

Raw format does not guarantee you a better picture.  It only offers a better chance of doing so.  There is no lose of data with Raw and there is with a jpg.  Secondly you choose what to do with and how to edit a Raw while the camera decides with jpg.  Sometimes the camera guesses right.

[tenofhearts12 · Accepted solution]

Thanks everyone, appreciate it!

[Waddizzle]

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@tenofhearts12 wrote:

Thanks for the response. I have just tried a few photos in RAW and used the RAW photo options in Paint Shop Pro and I am probably doing something wrong account I did not notice any improvement over the JPEG after adjustments to both formats. Could be the limitations of the programs' ability to deal with the RAW photo or my lack of experience or both 🙂

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One of the primary differences between adjust a RAW image compared to a JPEG, is the range of adjustments you can make with the a RAW file, and finer control you can get with more subtle adjustments. 

For example, a RAW file willl typically allow you to make very subtle adjustments to the contrast.  You can lighten up just the dark areas, or soften the overexposed areas, without creating a lot distortion.

[BurnUnit]

I think the T5i uses the same sensor and image processor as my 60D and I'm still surprised with how that camera handles low light high ISO shooting. ISO 800 to 1600 shoot cleanly for the most part and 3200 and above is doable with a ittle extra time in post.

For dealing with noise issues, this might be a case where you'll get better results doing RAW conversions with DPP instead of PS Pro. It seems like DPP automatically applies a bit of noise reduction when needed when it opens the RAW files. And of course you can do any additional tweaking as you see fit.

It also seems to help in low lighting conditions if you "expose to the right" to slightly overexpose your images. This refers to trying to get the bulk of your histogram more to the right side of the display, without blowing out the highlights. As already mentioned, darker underexposed areas in your image will tend to have more noise issues.

[TCampbell]

A RAW will typically look worse straight-out-of-the-camera... even though the image has significantly more information in it.

A RAW is a 14bit image with zero compression and you get everything the image sensor “saw” when it took the photo.

In contrast... a JPEG is an 8-bit image and it’s been post-processed by the camera to reduce noise, possibly apply some sharpening, adjust white-balance, adjust color, etc.  and all of this makes the resulting image look better straight-out-of-the-camera.  BUT... it also compresses the image to reduce storage size and this is a problem.  It uses an algorithm designed to decide when the difference between two pixels is too subtle for your eyeball to notice the difference.  In particularly, in the highlights or shadows it may just compress the pixels to be “the same” (normalization).  When you then try to perform some adjustments (brighten the shadows or bring down the highlights) and you expect to recover your detail of the information that really was there... you discover the information is GONE.  It’s not possible to recover because the compression algorithm assumed you’d never notice (and you wouldn’t have if you didn’t want to apply some adjustments) — so it eliminated those differences to help compress to a smaller size.

RAW images don’t make any adjustments or use “lossy” compression algorithms.  It gives you everything.  This means it’s up to you to do the processing that the camera would have done.

Many RAW workflow tools will build a camera “profile” and auto-apply certain adjustments as you import the images (but you can override everything).  Some tools don’t auto-apply adjustments on import, but you easily do them yourself.

When I import, usually I immediately adjust exposure, white balance, highlights & shadows, and then work on color... and image shot at high ISO might benefit from a tiny bit of de-noising.  Images might also benefit from a tiny amount of sharpening.  When I’m done, the resulting image looks far better than the JPEG that would have been straight-out-of-the-camera... but I had to do a bit of tweaking to get that result.

There are a few tricks to dealing with “noise”.  Noise tends to be more noticeable in dark areas vs. bright areas... so some of the more clever tools for dealing with noise (Imagenomic’s “Noiseware Pro” or NIK Collection’s “DFine 2”) will sample the amount of noise in shadow vs. bright areas and use algorithms that are more aggressive in shadows and less agressive in highlights.  They do this because when you de-noise an image, you also soften the details (so images may not look as sharp).

It’s also possible to build a mask that detects edges of contrast and block the de-noising software from working those areas (where you want to retain maximum detail and noise is less noticeable) and be more aggressive in flat non-contrasty areas (where noise is much more noticeable.)

[ebiggs1]

"A RAW is a 14bit image with zero compression..."a JPEG is an 8-bit image and it’s been post-processed by the camera..."

While true in theory it does not guarantee you a better photograph.  It simply offers you a better chance, however, some of the time the jpg will be just as good.  In fact a jpg can be used to advantage in some instances.  One might be high speed shooting where the camera's buffer can fill up rapidly. Or, perhaps you are a social media person that likes to post on Facebook, etc., jpg is fine.  Faster file transfer because of smaller files.

I shoot Raw 99% of the time because I want the best I can get.  Plus now it is a seamless process with current post editors.  It does make the case to always shoot Raw.  But once in a while...................