Tog-Talk
Photographers in conversation: Essential guidance for new photographers on technique and artistic growth. That’s what ‘Tog Talk’ is all about—bringing photographers together to share insights and elevate their craft.
Tog-Talk is the home of UK professional photographer, Kevin Ahronson (Founder of Hampshire School of Photography). Every two weeks he is joined by one of his ex-students (now turned professional photographer) Kelly Perrin, where they'll dive deep into topics that matter to beginners, from mastering your camera settings to developing your unique style.
On alternating weeks, Kevin will dedicate the episode to answering listener questions, providing personalised advice to help you overcome challenges and grow as a photographer. Whether you’re struggling with exposure, landscape photography, street photography, photographing people, portraits and families, macro photography, flash photography, learning about editing with Photoshop or Lightroom, seeking composition tips, or exploring creative ideas, Tog Talk is your go-to resource for learning and inspiration.
Make sure you subscribe, so that you never miss an episode of this engaging and informative podcast.
Tog-Talk
Ep. 35 High ISO or Post Processing: which brightening solution wins?
Welcome to another episode of Tog-Talk: Photographers in Conversation!
I’m Kevin Ahronson, founder of the Hampshire School of Photography, and this week, it’s a solo episode where I’ll be answering a listener question.
Just as a quick reminder, every other week, I fly solo, diving into the photography questions you send in, while on alternating weeks, I’m joined by my fantastic co-host, Kelly Perrin from the Big Ambition Photography Company. Kelly runs a local studio in Fleet and together we co-sponsor the Hampshire Photography Network, a thriving Facebook community of amateur photographers.
Today, I’ll be tackling a fantastic listener question about shooting in low light situations... should you underexpose in-camera and brighten in Lightroom, or let the ISO creep up and deal with the grain in post?
I’ll break down the differences between amplifying a signal in-camera versus brightening it in post-processing and explore which approach yields the best results.
As always, I’ve done my best to keep things as simple and practical as possible, although some subjects, by their nature, can be a bit more technical than others (this could be one of them). So, grab a cup of coffee and let’s dive in!
Be sure to stick around until the end, where I’ll share some exciting updates about our upcoming Photography Masterclass, workshops, and free Photographer’s Evenings.
Now, let’s get into it!
Photo Studio
Looking for an inexpensive, amateur-friendly photography studio in Hampshire? Check out Kelly's Photography Studio in Fleet (Hampshire)
Sharpen your photos
Topaz Photo AI, it really is the best AI-driven sharpening & noise reduction software out there. Use this link to download Topaz. You won't pay any more... but I will receive a small commission. Thank you for your support.
Got a Photography Question?
If you have a burning question about (virtually) anything to do with photography, click on this link. You can record your question onto your device (phone, laptop, etc) and if picked, I will play it during the show. https://www.tog-talk.com/voicemail/
Looking for courses
Want to find out about my live, in-person workshops, check out the Hampshire School of Photography website:
https://www.hampshirephotoschool.com
Hampshire Photography Network
A free Facebook group for amateur photographers who want to connect, collaborate and grow together.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1222685165227144
Contact me
You can contact me by leaving a message via this link: https://www.tog-talk.com/contact/
Hi, my name is Kevin Aronson from Hampshire School of Photography and welcome to TalkTalk 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0,.
Speaker 2:All engine running liftoff. We have a liftoff.
Speaker 1:And welcome to another edition of Talkog Talk Photographers in Conversation. My name is Kevin Aronson from Hampshire School of Photography and it's a solo episode. Just to remind you, every other week it's a solo. So one week is a solo which is me answering questions from the listeners, and then a week after, I'm joined by my glamorous co-host, kelly Perrin, from the Big Ambition Photographic Company I think that's what she calls it and she's got a local studio in Fleet. And if you are a member of the Hampshire Photography Network, which is a Facebook group and it's free to join then anyone a member of that group which she co-sponsors with me, then you get dramatically reduced rates of studio hire. I mean, the prices are already low anyway, but they go crazy low. Um, if you're a member of the group, so join the hampshire photography network. Just go into facebook and search for hampshire photography network. You'll find us. Uh, there's three questions to get in and you just have to tick another button that says you agree by our rules, or something like that, and then, once you've done that, you're allowed in and then you can post pictures, ask questions, go out on events, join up with others, partake in assignments. There's new stuff being posted regularly and there's new assignments and stuff to get you to post images every two or three days. So there's loads going on. It's the fastest growing and most active Facebook group for photographers in Hampshire bar none. It's amazing, okay, so welcome.
Speaker 1:It's Talk Talk again and it's answering listeners' questions. Answering listeners' questions. And we've got a question this week which is a really interesting one, but the young lady who submitted it didn't want her voice recorded, so we've taken the question and we've added an AI voice who will be known as Ivy. So Ivy is going to be our AI voice for anyone who's who doesn't want their voice appearing on the program. So over to Ivy as she reads out this question. Here we go over to Ivy.
Speaker 2:Hi Kelly, hi Kevin. Here's my question if you're in a low light situation, which of these two alternatives is the best to try to hopefully avoid getting a grainy image? So number one is underexpose the photo slightly in the camera to keep the iso level down and then brighten it up in Lightroom, or two, letting the ISO creep up to get the right exposure and then trying to remove the grain in the edit.
Speaker 1:Thanks, and thank you, ivy. And the name of the real person who submitted that question at her request remains a mystery, but thank you for sending it in, really appreciate it. So this is a really cool question and it's one I've been asked so many times in workshops, particularly the one year master class which I run every year, normally twice a year, and master class usually is full of people who are relatively new to photography or they are complete beginners. Hi everyone, it's Kevin Aaronson and I want to tell you about some exciting changes I've made to the Photography Masterclass, my in-person course that's been helping photographers grow since 2019. Yep, this is an in-person course, in a classroom, with me face to face. This is not online.
Speaker 1:As we approach our 10th intake in January, I've made some significant changes to celebrate this milestone. This masterclass goes beyond just technical skills. It's about learning to see the world as a photographer. I've shifted the focus to give even more attention to creativity, with three entire modules dedicated to developing your photographer's eye. I retained the more popular modules on shooting landscapes, photographing people, and there's a new one on black and white photography. This masterclass is more than just a course. It's a creative one-year journey you'll share with other passionate photographers growing together and forming lasting connections along the way Need more information, visit GoHSPcom, click on Courses and select Masterclass. I'll also provide a link in the show notes below.
Speaker 1:Okay, so now you understand about Masterclass. So it's one of those areas that fosters questions and it's incredibly common for this particular question to come up. So the question was what's better to do? To shoot the camera in low light conditions with a high ISO, and of course, you get a grainy image if you push it up too high. Even with today's modern mirrorless cameras, you can't escape the fact that the more you push your ISO up, the grainier your picture looks or the noisier your picture looks. So that's one option. The other option is to shoot with a lower ISO, get a dark picture so that the picture's underexposed, and when you put your RAW file into Lightroom, we're going to use Lightroom, because it's the one I know really well and it is the most commonly used editing tool on the face of the planet for photographers. So we'll stay with Lightroom. I recognise there are others. They're all good. They're all good, but as most people, by an enormous margin, use Lightroom, we're going to concentrate on that and in fact, even though I'm saying Lightroom. Really, the principle that I'm going to be explaining works for any editing software. So I'm going to say Lightroom, but it doesn't matter what you're using, whether it's PaintShop Pro, whether it's Affinity, whether it's a Sony system, whatever it is, even if it's a freebie like GIMP, the principle is still the same.
Speaker 1:Okay, right, so there's the scene. There's the scene. You're taking a picture and the light levels are low. It could be at night, maybe you're photographing a friend's wedding indoors and it's the winter and there's not much light around, and you've opened up your aperture and your lens as wide as possible to let as much light in as you can, and you daren't shoot at a slower shutter speed to let more light in, because now you're going to start getting camera shake or the things you're trying to photograph will just get motion blur. So you can't go any slower with your shutter speed, so you can't let any more light in via that route.
Speaker 1:All that's left you now is to crank up your ISO to get a picture that's bright enough. So do you crank it up to get a fully bright picture and risk all that digital noise, or do you crank it up to get a fully bright picture and risk all that digital noise? Or do you shoot it at the lower ISO, keep the digital noise levels low and then when you take that memory card, stick it onto your laptop or your desktop, stick it into Lightroom and then crank up the brightness levels there? What's the difference between the two? And arguably not very much, because most people understand ISO to be the sensitivity level of your sensor. So the more you turn it up, the more sensitive it is to low light. But it's an electronic adjustment. And, of course, when you put the file into Lightroom and you crank up the exposure in Lightroom, that's an electronic adjustment. So they're very similar.
Speaker 1:You could argue that cranking up the volume or the brightness, the volume of the light, the brightness in Lightroom is the same as turning up your ISO in your camera. They're both electronically brightening the picture up. There's a very strong parallel there and I've seen people argue online yeah well, there's no point in worrying about your ISO and shooting low and pushing it up in post, because it's just the same. If you bright it up in post, it's going to get just as noisy as when you shoot it with a high ISO in your camera. So this is this is a very good question and, um, I'm I'm very conscious that I don't want to get too technical.
Speaker 1:Um, well, I mean, some people will get lost if I get too technical. Some people will just get bored if I go too technical and they'll switch off. So I want to try and tell the story in simple terms that are just so interesting and appealing You'll never, ever want to turn off. Okay, look, let's. Let's just uh, let's just relax, grab a cup of coffee. All right, I'm going to put this on pause. I'm going to go grab a cup of coffee and I'll come back and we'll start trying to digest this, because I think what we've got here is a superb, superb question which does deserve a decent answer.
Speaker 1:Well, at the end of my office, the other end of my office, I've got my drinks environment with a coffee machine. I've got an espresso there, but while it was chucking out my coffee, I was just thinking, because I'm looking right next to my espresso. I've got this light pad with whiskies and rums and brandy standing on it. I've got 13 bottles of whisky at the moment. 13 bottles of whisky, jeez.
Speaker 1:And yet a friend of mine I say he's a friend, he's a manager of a whiskey store about four miles from here and he's got 40 bottles of rum in his house. When I reacted to that, he said that's nothing. He said guess how many bottles of whiskey? He's got a thousand bottles of whiskey in his house. I said how on earth can you spend that much money on whiskey? My wife would kill me. He says oh well, she spends her money on shoes. Apparently they spend the same sort of money, but he spends his on whiskey and she spends hers on shoes. Sounds perfectly fair to me. So a quick sip of what is in fact. I think it's a Starbucks decaf coffee from their Nespresso range and it's okay it's okay it's wet, it has a bit of flavor to it.
Speaker 1:So here we go. Then here's the question Do we crank up the ISO or do we brighten up in Lightroom? Let's have a look at ISO. So almost almost with that exception, over the past, let's say, 10 years, there hasn't been more than maybe two people I know who have correctly answered the question about what ISO is, because when I ask most photographers they say, oh, it's just the sensitivity of the camera to light. Now that answer is based on a number of things.
Speaker 1:First of all, historically, back in the days of film, there was something which predated ISO. It was called ASA, which stood for American Standards Association, and in Europe there was DIN, which is a German equivalent, and it was the international standards that governed sensitivity of film. That governed sensitivity of film, and the bigger the number in ASA, the more sensitive it was to light. It could work in lower lighting conditions. So most people shot with film, which was 100 ISO, but you could buy 200 ISO and you could buy 400, and there were some manufacturers towards the end who were producing 3200 ISO. But of course, with film, once you put that film in the camera, you can't change the ISO. Once digital came along, you can change the ISO, and it was quite liberating because now you weren't limited to shooting at just that one level of sensitivity. But here's the big thing Although most photographers talk about ISO as being the sensitivity of a sensor, they're all completely wrong.
Speaker 1:And there is there's this thing which happens in all walks of life, where you pick up something from someone a concept, an explanation of about something you're interested in. Maybe you both go to the same camera club or you, you know, you watch a blog by someone and they're saying it. And then you pick it up from somebody else and they're saying it and we don't question it, we just assume it's correct. And this is not just restricted to photography. This happens right across the board, from politics to religion, but it's the same with everything. So whether you're into knitting or playing a guitar, playing a piano, whether you're a dancer or a sculptor or a painter or a writer, you will pick up things about the subject you're interested in, from people or from books and assume they are correct. But this is one of those areas where it is not correct. So ISO is not sensitivity. Ok, let's just get this out of the way. Iso is not the sensitivity of your sensor.
Speaker 1:So ISO is a Geneva-based company whose name is the International Organization for Standardization, whose name is the International Organisation for Standardisation. So their actual initials are IOS, but they are known as ISO and they've deliberately chosen to be recognised as ISO because ISO in Greek means equal. Ah, so they are. In fact, if you've got the initials, the correct way around it would be IOS, but they like to refer to themselves as ISO Because ISO means equal.
Speaker 1:So ISO controls, or rather administers the global international standard. So in the old days we had the ASA in film American Standards Association In Germany. It was the Deutschland, probably international numbering city. In the old days we had the ASA in film American Standards Association In Germany. It was the Deutschland probably International Numbering System. I don't know what the IN stood for, d is almost certainly Deutschland and these controlled the global standards so that when you manufacture film back in those days, everything's manufactured to the same specifications and standards, so that everything behaves the same way. So when they decided to have one single governing controlling system, which is ISO, isa and DIN disappeared and everything became ISO.
Speaker 1:But ISO doesn't just control film. It controls something like 24, 000 different global standards, from electrical standards, chemical, business standards. You may know someone who works for a company which has received an iso 9001 certificate. That says that that company is doing things in a certain way and it's a reasonably high level actually, and as such, iso is a company who recommends them or recognises them and has awarded them the 9001 certificate. So ISO controls loads and loads of things around the planet. Whether you're building a railway train, whether you're building or railway train, whether you're building or blowing a milk bottle, whether you're building a toothbrush, you'll be using stuff that's recommended and controlled and administered by ISO in Geneva. So the control of plastics, the control of electrics, the control of water, you name it they have the international standard.
Speaker 1:And if you were a camera manufacturer, just starting as a brand new manufacturer, and you wanted the sensor in your camera to adhere to all the other global standards, you click onto the ISO website, you find a page which controls camera sensors and sensitivities and so on, and you pay something like 117 Swiss francs and you download a PDF with all the instructions on how to build your sensor so that it conforms with everybody else's. So that's where ISO comes from. Bet you didn't know that, did you? Okay, coffee time, hang on. Will it make a noise? Mmm, I have to make a noise for the microphone, so let's go back to the camera.
Speaker 1:Ok, so how does ISO apply to the sensor in our cameras? Right, we all know hopefully most of us that there are three things that control the exposure of our images. So we have the aperture, we have shutter speed and we have ISO. So aperture controls the amount of light coming in by opening up the diaphragm in the lens. Big aperture, like leaves which move apart and get closer together to make a small hole or a large hole the bigger the hole is, the more light comes through. So aperture controls the quantity of light. Shutter speed controls how long that light goes in, for it controls the duration of light. So those two elements combined control quite a bit of the light going into your camera and they do it with a very physical, natural way. There's no artificial elements in there. One is the amount of light and the other one is the duration of that amount of light. So those two allow the light to pass through the lens, pass the shutter and hit the sensor.
Speaker 1:The sensor is covered in millions of pixels and a 20 megapixel sensor has 20 million pixels on it. Pixels are just detectors of light. They're little, tiny little buckets which collect photons, which are light particles, and they filter out the red, green, blue colours so that you can build up a colour image from those. And the light strikes that, with red, green and blue filtered out in the correct proportions, and once the light strikes, the sensor, where the data from the sensor is then transmitted to the camera's processor. So the light has come in through the lens, past the shutter, hit the sensor and the signal from the sensor is now transmitting all that data to the camera's processor.
Speaker 1:Now, if at this point the picture's a bit dark, you crank up the ISO, and that cranking up of the ISO amplifies the signal from the sensor. It makes it louder, which means the picture gets brighter. However, as that signal is amplified, every imperfection on that sensor is amplified with it, and that's because it's actually impossible at the moment to produce 20 million or in some cases 40, 50 million or if you've got a sony, it's 60 odd million pixels, all of them performing perfectly error-free, and you end up with a signal leaving the sensor on its way to the processor, with errors in it, with distortions and all kinds of strange signals going to the processor and when you amplify the signal to brighten the picture up which is that you know which is what you're doing when you're turning up your iso control, you're not only turning up the brightness of the picture, but you're amplifying all those inconsistencies. So you see grain and you also see something which is referred to in in photography speakers, artifacts, and these are strangely looking imperfections in the image. There might be color, there might be some kind of strange shape, but they're imperfections caused by the fact we've taken an imperfect signal coming off the sensor and amplified it. We've increased its intensity. All right, are you all with me at the moment? So the noise that you see in ISO is down to the fact that all those millions of pixels are not perfect. The signal coming off the sensor is not perfect and whatever imperfections are there, the process of turning up your ISO, your gain as you amplify that signal, as you apply gain to that signal. So all those imperfections are amplified as well.
Speaker 1:Let's best, ivy said, if you're shooting in a low light situation and the only thing you can afford to increase is the ISO, you can't open up your aperture anymore. Perhaps it's already maximum. You don't want to slow down your shutter anymore to let more light in, because you're already shooting at quite a slow shutter speed and movement may become blurred. So you want to keep your shutter speed as high as where it is at the moment. So the only thing you've got left to do is to push up your ISO. If you don't push up your ISO quite so much, what's the effect then if you take the camera's memory card and load it onto your computer and import it into Lightroom and you see it's dark and you push up the brightness? Good question. So I'm just going to go back a couple of steps, just so people who are not really into technical stuff do kind of get their head around this. So the lights hit your sensor.
Speaker 1:The sensor is now sending the data to the camera's processor, where, if you've applied any ISO adjustments, that's where that's going to be addressed. And of course, once it's been processed by the camera's processor, it's then stored on your memory card. So it goes from sensor to processor to memory card. And now you take a memory card out of your camera and you plug it in to your computer, you load it into Lightroom or whatever software you're using and the picture looks dark. So you decide now to amplify that signal. It's on the dark side. So you grab the slider in Lightroom that says exposure, you move it to the right and the picture suddenly is brighter and it's perfect. The question then is, as Ivy said, which is better or worse, or are they the same? So if I brighten it up in Lightroom, what's the grain going to be like? What's the noise going to be like? Is it going to be as bad as if I turned up the ISO in the camera? And you want to know the answer? I'll tell you the answer after this.
Speaker 1:Hi, this is Kevin Aaronson and I'd like to invite you to something really quite unique. It's called a photographer's evening. For the last six years, I have held small in-person roundtable gatherings with local photographers who are new to Hampshire School of Photography. The evenings are completely free and they are a great opportunity to talk about photography, share advice and network with other like-minded people. These evenings are designed for photographers who are still early in their photography journey, those who have never attended before any of our workshops and aren't professional or semi-professional photographers. Over the course of the evening we'll dive into various photography topics and you'll have a chance to submit your own photos for review if you'd like, your own photos for review, if you'd like. It's a relaxed, friendly setting where you can explore your progress, ask questions and gain loads of valuable insight from someone with decades of experience. If you're interested, head over to the GoHSPcom website to learn more. I'll post a link in the show notes below.
Speaker 1:Please hang up and try again. I hope you haven't fallen asleep yet. When you're in the camera and you're turning up the ISO, the ISO is increasing the gain of the data signal coming off of the sensor and on its way to the processor. Signal coming off of the sensor and on its way to the processor. And when it does that, the whole signal is amplified. And when you do push up the ISO on any image, if you are pushing it up so high that you can see a lot of noise, a lot of grain, a lot of artefacts, it usually shows up most of all in the shadow. So one trick I've learnt is that if you're shooting with a high ISO, it's worth pushing it up a fraction more than you normally would so that the picture doesn't have too many dark areas. In. Try and get lots of highlights in. Try and expose in such a way that it is genuinely a bright picture, because grain shows more in the darker areas. Okay, that's one trick. It doesn't always work, but it does work sometimes. It depends on the picture and how much of the picture is in shadow and how much of it is in mid-tones and how much is in highlights, but it can work. Pictures can look much better in high ISO if you've slightly gone towards the high end of your exposure to give a generally bright image and avoid having too many dark shadows. It's the dark shadows that show the grain. Okay, so that's one thing.
Speaker 1:Now the difference between a brightened image in your camera and a brightened image in software is really simple. In the camera, the whole signal has gain or amplification applied to it. If you then take a picture which is a little bit underexposed and you put that into Lightroom, the brightening process is not amplifying the signal. It's applying different luminance values to the individual pixels. It's brightening up the pixels rather than amplifying the signal. So let's just get your head around that. When you're brightening the image in the camera, you're amplifying the signal, all of it. When you're brightening the picture in Lightroom, you're just increasing the lumens, the brightness value of the pixels. You're brightening the pixels, not amplifying the signal. There's a difference. One's amplifying the whole signal. One is just applying a brightening of lumen levels, as opposed to changing the colour saturation. You're changing the brightness. There's three things you can do to a colour you can increase or decrease the brightness, you can increase or decrease the saturation, or you can change the hue of a colour, so you can make a red, more orange or more purpley, and also you can do it in a localised way.
Speaker 1:So if you've got a picture which is underexposed, you probably only want to adjust the shadows. You may not want to adjust any of the highlights, you may want to push up the mid-tones, but any really bright areas of the pictures which don't need adjusting, you don't have to. You only usually want to brighten up those areas which are ridiculously dark Because of the nature of the editing tool. You don't have to brighten up the whole picture, you only brighten up the areas you want, and Lightroom is sufficiently clever that you can choose which parts of the image you want to brighten up. So if we compare again, in the camera everything's amplified, highlights as well as shadows. In the software you get to apply the brightness of the pixels, the brightness levels, wherever you want. So you've got more control.
Speaker 1:Here's the thing. The problem with relying on a high ISO sometimes is that you've not given yourself any choices. The choice you've made to brighten up using ISO cannot be reversed, whereas if you took a reasonable exposure and maybe the picture's a little bit on the dark side, maybe one or two stops darker than it needs to be. You put that into Lightroom and you can brighten it up and actually you end up with a picture which hasn't got all of that amplification noise that you would have got with ISO and if you have, it might only be restricted to the dark areas which you can treat separately. So the instant and obvious answer to the question is should I put my ISO up or should I not put my ISO up but amplify or brighten it up in Lightroom? Usually, I think you can probably say with a fair degree of accuracy, you'll end up with less noise and grain and artifacts if you do the brightening up process in post. And if you're not familiar with that term, in post it means in post processing, after you've taken a shot. Post processing we tend to say post. So there's a simple answer all right, ivy, if you can shoot the shot keeping your ISO low, but brighten it up in post, and you you should end up with an image that has got less noise in it, especially if you're able to target the areas specifically which are a bit dark and not do any dramatic changes to the other areas. Okay, I hope that's kind of helpful. Just going to have one more sip of coffee. It's starting to get cold now, but of course the story doesn't end there.
Speaker 1:One of the other disadvantages of shooting with a high ISO is a loss of detail from the image. You do tend to lose detail, so you could take it out of the camera. You could take the memory card out, put it into Lightroom and try sharpening in post. But if you use Lightroom or Photoshop sharpening methods, they're not really sharpening it. All they're doing is increasing the contrast between pixels. Where they detect a sharp area in the picture, they increase the contrast between pixels in that part of the picture to give the impression that it's sharper, but they don't actually sharpen it. You'd be better off putting it through a tool like Topaz, which uses AI to sharpen a photograph, and it's not 100% perfect, but it's way way better than Lightroom or Photoshop.
Speaker 1:I'm sure they'll catch up eventually, but Topaz is by far the best product on the market out there for sharpening afterwards, which is why I'm an affiliate for it. Because I was so impressed, I became an affiliate. I'll put a link to Topaz down below in the show notes. I should point out that if you do buy Vi there, you don't get any cheaper or you don't pay any more for it. You pay the same price as everybody else, but I think I'll get about 15 quid out of it, which is not a lot of money, but every little bit helps, yeah, okay. Anyway, I was so impressed with Topaz and its sharpening ability that I contacted them, said I'd love to be an affiliate because I want to tell people about how good you are. So I tell my students about it all the time.
Speaker 1:Now, if you were to sharpen in Topaz, you could recover some of that lost detail.
Speaker 1:In fact, it's not recovered, it's artificially created. So we are moving into a very complex area because, whilst it's true that your best solution is to get it as best you can in the camera, keeping your ISO as low as possible, best you can in the camera, keeping your ISO as low as possible, despite the fact that so many of today's modern mirrorless cameras have a much better low light capability, the principle still holds true you get your best picture for the at the native ISO. So if your native ISO is 100, I always try to keep my my ISO down to as close to that as possible, because that's the image at its best, before any gains applied to it. So there is a lot of pressure from people saying no, no, don't need to worry about now. I saw is so good now on modern cameras that you can take it at what you like. Not entirely true, because as soon as you apply any gain to a signal coming off the sensor, you will be creating noise in that image.
Speaker 1:It may not be as much as it used to be in the old days, but it's still there and it will affect your ability to draw out the shadows as much as a file. An image which has been shot at the native ISO, so always at the native ISO is where you want to take your picture, if possible. That will give you the greatest latitude in editing to bring out shadow detail and highlight detail. But because AI is now having such a dramatic effect on our ability to edit, there's almost almost, we've almost reached a stage now where ISO is less important, because if we have a picture which is grainy, which is noisy, which has got loads of artefacts in, we can shove it through Lightroom's denoise, which does a pretty good job, to a raw file, or we can shove it through Topaz, which does a pretty good job and it's not restricted to raw. You can put any file virtually through Topaz and that will get rid of that background noise. It does a brilliant job. But of course, the more that you do, the more detail you lose and at least with Topaz you can bring some of that detail back which you can't with Lightroom. It's a complex area and possibly it's a question all on its own for another episode. But to answer Ivy's question, which is the best? To shoot with a high ISO when you need that little extra bit of exposure or to shoot with a lower ISO, slightly underexposed your image and then bring out the shadow detail in Lightroom? It's the latter that will give you the best picture. Whoa, interesting, interesting, I bet you. That will give you the best picture. Interesting, interesting, I bet you. I bet you've learnt some stuff there that you didn't know. Thank you again, ivy, for sending that in.
Speaker 1:Just a quick word about Hampshire School of Photography. Just a reminder we've got the new masterclass, number 10, starting in January of next year. So we're only a few months away and we've got a few places left. So check out the website, which is gohspcom, that's G-O-H-S-P. Go, hampshire School of Photographycom, gohspcom. Check out the website and click on the courses there and you'll see masterclass. And for anyone who thinks they're quite new to photography and would like to really get their head around aperture, shutter speed, iso, the exposure triangle, that kind of stuff, we've got a one-day workshop on the 9th of november, relatively inexpensive. Again, check out the website, gohspcom. Now, if you live in a striking distance of fleet, of course, you can always come to one of our free photographer's evenings.
Speaker 1:So once a month I sit with eight photographers all amateurs, no pros there, no semi-pros. These are guys who are still quite new on a photography journey and they're people that I've never met before. Because I'm looking for some fresh feedback. I don't want to hear from people I already know. I've already spoken with them. So on the 10th of October and the 14th of November, eight people meet with me in a small room on a Thursday evening and we just look at their work, we look at their photos, we talk about the problems they're having. I answer loads and loads of questions. I in turn get great feedback on what's going through photographers' minds on a month-by-month basis, which helps me fine-tune my workshop. So it's a win-win situation, all right.
Speaker 1:So again, check out the website and click on free evenings. If you click on free evenings, it talks about the photographer's evening and read all that, and at the bottom there's a little link you click on and it takes you to Eventbrite to book your place. So it's free, doesn't cost a penny. No catches, doesn't cost you a penny. All right, thank you again for listening. Thank you everybody for your continued patronage. Please like and subscribe to this podcast. I really do want to increase the number of people who can tap into it, and while the numbers remain low because we're new, people can't find us. So the more people who like and subscribe particularly if they subscribe, the more we're going to go up in the ratings and make it easy for photographers like yourselves to find us.
Speaker 1:Good, all right. Well, next week it's Kelly joining me and I'm going to tell you in advance what the subject is, because there's a very close link between next week and what I've just spoken about. So next week, kelly, I'm sorry for telling everybody this in advance, but you can see it's worth saying it's looking at the debate of RAW versus JPEG, raw versus JPEG, raw versus JPEG. Interesting conversation. We've already recorded it. It was a really outstanding conversation. Hopefully you'll be with us next week to listen to it. For now, from me, it's goodbye, see you.
