I was out with the inlaws yesterday night in a very atmospheric restaurant which was lit by candle light and I was trying to get some photos to mark the family occasion (Birthday).
With my normal ISO range of 100-400 which I am comfortable with Noise levels on my 550D. I was getting about a second of a second shutter speed (Even in Manual with a couple of stops under) on my 17-50mm 2.8 wide open. No the IS/VS/VR is good on my Tamron 17-50, but its not that good. Also given that I was on the wine (added sway) there was no way I was going to get a good photo. I reluctantly upped the ISO to 1600 and managed to get a shutter of 10th to 15th of a second by tuning the scene in Manual mode using the Live view functionality.
Post processing today and there was considerable noise on faces, but as usual the Tammy was pin sharp wide open so I had some leeway for noise reduction. On advice from a friend I fire up Lightroom for only the second time and began to play with the noise reduction settings. I am actually very impressed with the outcome and from now on I will be shooting up to 1600 ISO on my camera and possibly beyond to 3200ISO.
Below are a couple of 100% crops from the image so show the differences after noise removal (a lot of trial and error required to make it look right) and a little tweaking of the Hue and Sat curve over the entire image.
Before
[ATTACH=CONFIG]1443[/ATTACH]
After
[ATTACH=CONFIG]1442[/ATTACH]
Whenever you remove noise from an image you are averaging out a single pixel with the pixels around it. This will reduce the sharpness of the image so noise removal is always a trade off between noise and sharpness.
If you go too overboard you will just end up removing all shadows and highlights so use sparingly and fiddle to get what you need.
Remember, get the shot, it doesn't matter how grainy it looks just get the shot that you otherwise wouldn't and worry about post processing later. I almost didn't take any photos as I am a purist and don't like to fiddle but the results are not half bad from this exercise and I am really glad I used ISO 1600 and took photos. Next time if I need to I will use 3200.
Hope this helps someone out.
Keep shooting (Cameras and Pubs in-game)
DZ
Noise reduction in Lightroom v4 is getting so good I wonder if there's a future for the 3rd party software makers who produce dedicated noise reduction software?