New Pics (Week 8)... A Noisy Saturday

I really wanted to title this post Silent Saturday because I'm too tired to write today but then I realized silent is not the same as wordless.  Hello!  So anyway, I went with 'A Noisy Saturday' because the following pictures were all taken with my ISO as high as 1600!  Yeah you heard me right.  And I hate noise!  I had no choice though.  I wasn't resorting to the flash.  I'm too in love with the look of natural light photography.  Anyhow, I'm starting to change my mind a bit.  About noise that is.  My sister said that a noisy picture isn't always bad especially when the picture is good.  She said you wouldn't notice the noise in a good picture and that sometimes (good) noise can add to the details of your subject.  That's right, I guess there is good noise and bad noise!  Boy my sister is one smart cookie!  In fact, I wouldn't have believed her as much until I saw it myself.  These pictures didn't bother me so much.  If this were about a month ago I would have labeled these 'ruined' and put them aside to collect cyber dust.  In fact, I was very happy with them!  I used PSE to reduce the noise a little but actually left a lot of it in!  In a way, the noise made the picture almost sharper!  So to stick to my previously written words of a prior post, 'I can tone it down', these edits were almost entirely to the color and lighting of the photograph ONLY.  No airbrushing, wrinkle removing or eye brightening actions used from Picnik!  Here is my Livvy, au naturale, in all her splendor!

Below I share 3 different versions of each picture.  Almost each picture.  The first one being my SOOC (straight out of camera) shot, the second one with minor edits to the color and lighting, and the third with even more edits to the contrast.  Not sure which ones I like better.  I kind of wanted to see what my sister thought.  I did take notice that when you add too much contrast you can begin to blow out the highlighted parts of the photograph leaving almost no detail.  Obviously I do not want to do that. 

The last few shots were not my favorite by any means.  As most of you already know, JPEG files can only be edited so much.  Increasing the exposure made the picture SUPER grainy so to hide this I converted some to black and white.  If I were editing a RAW file, they could have been saved.  Which reminds me.  I have to look into why my version of PSE will not open RAW files.  This is the only reason I am not shooting RAW yet.  It's a bit of a pain in the behind if you know what I mean. 

Also, I feel like I have a better trained photographer's eye.  I am starting to notice the information a picture loses when it is compressed/resized for posting.  These look so much better (sharper) at their original size.   It's a little disappointing.  I'll have to do a little research on how I can maintain the quality of the original size photo when it is being resized or, worse, COMPRESSED! 

And to think that I wanted to title this post 'Silent Saturday'.  Who am I kidding?  I guess I had quite a bit to say.  With all the interruptions it only took me about 12 hours to write this. 

- Night Folks.  Until tomorrow maybe?