photos grainy! HELP!

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OK grr I am so mad at myself.. some setting was off on my camera today, most if not all of the photos look grainy. i have no clue what I have done.. I did notice the ISO was up fairly high at one point and lowered it, but that didnt seem to help. Is there anything I can do in photoshop to fix this?? ( im sure there isnt since it was a setting) but at this point I am willing to try anything to fix them! And does anyone know what in the world I have done to my camera?? Normally I am pretty dang good about checking everything and I didnt notice anything "off" I've got a NIkon D4o and was shooting with a 70-300mm. I'm going to attach a few photos so you can see HOW BAD IT IS lol

Attachments:

DSC_0443.jpg, 662 KB
DSC_0394.jpg, 1.2 MB
DSC_0400.jpg, 715 KB

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Permalink Reply by Joe Cheray on November 23, 2008 at 9:04pm

Jenn check these out I took the jpeg artifact out and also the digital camera noise then jpeg optimized them it took alot of the graininess out that you were worried about.

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Permalink Reply by Ziv on November 24, 2008 at 12:46am: Jenn,

Let me start by saying -- AWESOME photos. In my opinion -- there is NOTHING wrong with them. What you're calling "grain" is just high-ISO noise that is being "fixed" by the camera's noise reduction mechanism. The photos are beautiful, and although I totally appreciate what Joe did for you, your images look much better than the smoothed out images that came out of her post-processing.

The reason that this happened to you is that they were shot at very high ISO and also, you've enabled "high-ISO noise removal", and it's probably set to High. So the images are starting to "fall apart". Just experiment by lowering the ISO (it may have been kicked up, by mistake), and also lower the noise removal to Normal or Low or None. If you set the Noise Removal to None, and you shoot at high ISO, THEN, you'll REALLY have grain, but it'll look different than this. It'll really look like color noise if you're shooting color JPG's, and in B&W, it'll look good -- like film grain (white and black dots)

You can always reset your camera by pressing the 2 buttons that correspond to the green dots, or reset to defaults using the menus.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Ziv on November 24, 2008 at 12:54am

OK, Jenn,

I took a look at the EXIF header of your images. You DID set something in the D40 that set this off. It's not just high ISO. I don't have time to dig through the D40 manual to see which exact feature you've enabled, but I can see several things in this image that are causing this (take a look a the screen shot that I've attached):

Gain Control -- high gain up -- this could also be Apple's way of saying "high ISO"
you also have high saturation set to high, which made this look even more pronounced
your sharpness is set to high, and that also made it look pronounced

I'm also seeing that you've modified the file in Photoshop CS4, so this is not the original file, so it's hard to say.

Just reset the camera...

Attachments:

Picture 2.png, 64 KB

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Permalink Reply by Jenn on November 24, 2008 at 7:41am: first thank you so much for the comliment!! this is def not my best work!!! I am actually thinking that when I took some pictures of the fall leaves I set the ISO that high as well as the saturation! UGH I could kick myself right now!!! Good thing that he is related and wont mind doing another shoot LOL. Im going to reset the camera and then go from there :) When I saw you wrote the saturation was too high, I remembered taking those fall shots and bam, im guessing that is the prob, a long with the high ISO. thanks you guys so so much!!!; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Ziv on December 6, 2008 at 1:24am: AWESOME :-) Glad you have your D40 back :-)

Jenn said:
first thank you so much for the comliment!! this is def not my best work!!! I am actually thinking that when I took some pictures of the fall leaves I set the ISO that high as well as the saturation! UGH I could kick myself right now!!! Good thing that he is related and wont mind doing another shoot LOL. Im going to reset the camera and then go from there :) When I saw you wrote the saturation was too high, I remembered taking those fall shots and bam, im guessing that is the prob, a long with the high ISO. thanks you guys so so much!!!; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Karen U on December 15, 2008 at 5:43pm: wow! i LOVE taking pictures and i love getting ideas from people . the picture of the hands....awesome....again, wow!; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Diane on February 19, 2009 at 7:25pm: This doesn't look like grain to me, it looks like they were oversharpened and the blacks are falling apart. Glad you figured out what was causing it.

There is no way to save them, especially if you captured in jpg. Try capturing in RAW because you get more information for the PS programs to use when you work on them.

Nikon cameras (until the newest generation) are notorious for grain at high ISO's so avoid them when possible.

Nice work.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Monica Martin on March 4, 2009 at 4:00pm: you need IMAGENOMIC PLUG IN, it's about $60.00 or so, but it will get rid of your noise. It works with Photoshop. The most amazing noise removal plug in ever!; ▶ Reply to This