I shot this image Friday night on my way home from Ribeira, but I didn’t hold much expectation that it would turn out well enough to post.
<– This is where the post gets super-geeky. –>
EXIF: 1/125 sec (handheld), f/2.2, ISO 400, 50mm f/1.8 (my worst lens, because my 50mm f/1.4’s autofocus isn’t working and my night vision is terrible)
Building lighting at night is terribly uneven. A longer exposure won’t work when the lighting is very uneven because the highlights get completely blown out, while the shadows are too deep and low on detail to warrant trying to rescue both ends of the histogram. This is not a condition unique to Porto, it’s the way buildings are lit everywhere.
Partway through a conversation with a friend recently, I stumbled upon a way to improve the noise reduction between Nikon Capture NX2 and Picture Code’s Photo Ninja in order to rescue a photo from its original state of nothingness.
I’ve rescued photos from near-nothingness before using just Capture NX2, but had to convert the RAW file in NEF format to TIF before running it through Photo Ninja to reduce noise. Apparently I wasn’t paying attention to release notes (c’mon, I know you don’t read them all, either!), because now I can tweak NEF files directly in Photo Ninja. Previously, I only used Photo Ninja for its noise reduction capabilities but only more recently I’ve discovered how well it performs in tweaking exposure. While I can’t save those tweaks directly in the native NEF format, at least I can output the file with the changes.
I did a little test of the RAW files using three techniques to see how they compare with each other:
- NEF to TIF, Photo Ninja, TIF/JPG
- NEF, Photo Ninja, TIF/JPG
- NEF to JPG, Photo Ninja, TIF/JPG
What was interesting was how little difference there was in the final file between techniques #1 and #3. Far and away the clear winner in clarity and quality was #2, using only the NEF file in Photo Ninja and outputting it to TIF or JPG. Once I do more testing, I will report my findings here and share them with anyone who uses the software, or who wants to see if the software is worth the price tag.
For me, this is a breakthrough. Nightshots are a minority of what I shoot, but it’s definitely an area in which I want to improve. Plus, we’re now just a few weeks off from official winter and there are lots of nightshots in my near future. The nighttime temps have dropped significantly over this weekend, and I don’t want to do long exposures if I can help it!
November 20, 2015
Album: Portugal [Autumn 2015]
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