I recently had a day trip and although it started relatively sunny the light slowly got poorer as the day went on. I stupidly didn't pay much attention to my camera settings and mostly clicked away with the automatic settings. Perhaps my camera is just getting old for I've never noticed this before but now I can see the photos full sized on the computer they all have bad white noise on the images. It's not like it's a few images taken indoors without putting the correct settings on the camera, which I wouldn't mind so much but this is all the photos from the day. They were all taken outside in daylight, on automatic portrait, landscape settings etc. The light didn't look bad to me and my camera never suggested flash which is when I usually start playing with the settings more. Is there anything I can do to improve the look of the images I have; or is this just to teach me to think more before snapping away?
Reply to this By "white noise", do you mean the pictures are overexposed or that they're grainy? You can improve overexposed pictures in lots of applications (Picasa is a decent free one - play around with the Shadows setting on the Tuning tab) but it will depend on how overexposed they are - if it's really bad (aka blown highlights) then you might be out of luck with the worst parts. For graininess, I've read a few positive reviews of Neat Image and Noiseware but I've never used either of them. No doubt Photoshop can do all this stuff too but it's far from free.
As to why you're getting this problem now, it would appear that either your camera is broken or you've somehow changed the default settings. I'll assume it's the latter. Looking at your latest blog, you seem to be using a S5iS. I have a S3iS - hopefully the S5iS isn't massively different so my suggestions below might make sense.
If overexposure is the issue, it could be because you've changed the exposure compensation. If you press the Func button, the first icon selected is for exposure compensation. That should normally be 0 - any other setting will mean the camera is deliberately over/underexposing. Another possibly is that you've changed the metering mode to spot metering, however the only way that would result in continual overexposure is if you were constantly metering off dark parts of every scene that you shot - which is unlikely.
If graininess is the issue, the likeliest reason is that you're shooting on too high an ISO. Press the ISO button to cycle through the options. If you're keen on using the automated modes, it should be on ISO Auto.
If this doesn't help, could you maybe post one of the affected pictures in this thread? Also, if you can list the camera settings that the picture was taken with, that would be useful too.
From my experience with the S3iS, I found pictures were unacceptably grainy at anything more than ISO 200. I found the camera tended to overexpose (though not massively). I also found the colours were dull compared to my previous Panasonic FZ20 (if you set the My Colors setting to Vivid then the colours are better). Meaning I ended up always using Manual mode and forcing the ISO to be 80 or 100. I don't know if these niggles carried forward to the S5iS but just thought I'd mention them.
Reply to this Yeah the sort of white speckled bits on the pictures - especially on people's faces. It's just such a shame. Yes - everything was on automatic, including the ISO. I honestly don't know what happened - maybe the camera is just old. It's never happened before.
Thanks for the advice anyway. :D
Reply to this If you look at the camera settings for one of these photos, what does it say?
Reply to this Oh dear.... just had a look at the pictures and then the camera. It's a poor old thing. It has two ISO settings on automatic, 'Auto ISO' and 'Hi auto ISO'. It's stuck on the latter. All the pictures are 400 or more, in some cases 800. I'll assume this is my problem!!!
Any advice on how to repair the pictures a little? I have picasa and yes changing shadows and contrast helps a little, is there anything I can do to smooth the images a bit more? It's bad on people's faces - it looks like we've all recently recovered from smallpox or something! Hehe.
Reply to this As mentioned above, you might be able to salvage them with Neat Image or Noiseware, both of which I think have (limited functionality) free versions. However I've never used either of them - I've just read positive comments on various photography sites. Good luck ...
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