One more trip to the "studio" this morning to compare High ISO noise reduction on the G15, G5 X and G5 X MK2. The first two have low, standard and high settings while the last has two additional settings, off and multi-shot noise reduction. Back at the house, I loaded them into Lightroom, looked at them carefully, and concluded there was nothing surprising.

I learned a couple things. (1) Judicious application of the Luminance Noise Reduction slider in Lightroom gives the same result as the in camera noise reduction. You can actually do a bit better to fit your taste by fiddling with the Detail slider. (2) Keep the high ISO noise reduction in the camera set to the lowest setting. You can adjust noise very simply later if needed.

Then once again the light came on in the attic. Is it possible to go back and see what I got with the high ISO setting in the camera? It sure is and that is what I did. First I had a look at all the photos taken at ISO 3200 with the G15. The Lightroom search function is very handy at that. I noticed that an appreciable amount of the frames were taken at shutter speeds above 1/200 which means I could have reduced both ISO and shutter speed to get a suitable exposure (and don't forget f/ stop!). That is a good thing to remember. I looked closely at the noise and found that in "busy" scenes, the noise really didn't matter that much and it is easily treated with the sliders. In some scenes the noise was appreciable, but I found that they were not in sharp focus which makes the noise reduction sliders useless.

So what? I hear you mutter. Well, the lesson is to keep the lowest noise reduction setting and be more mindful of your exposure settings.

Today's photo is a screen grab of the Lightroom interface while I was searching for photos. The search engine is very powerful. Try it some time.

p.s. My friend Chris Gibbins mentioned yesterday that cameras are getting more complex. Just for grins I counted the number of menu settings for the G5 X MK2 and found 102. Jeesh. There are very few I ever fiddle with and sometimes just finding them in the menu system is a challenge.