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You are here: Home / The Last Word / Sony a6300 — underexposure and pushing in post

Sony a6300 — underexposure and pushing in post

March 17, 2016 JimK 3 Comments

This is part of a long series of posts about the Sony a6300. The series starts here.

We saw in the a6300 read noise tests that I posted earlier that the input-referred read noise of the Sony 6300 in single shot shutter mode didn’t vary much from ISO 100 to 320 and from ISO 400 to 1600 or so. That usually means that images in those ranges underexposed and pushed in post processing have very similar noise as images whose brightness is raised by cranking up the camera’s ISO knob. A benefit of pushing in post with the ISO set lower than normal is that you can get a film-like slow clopping behavior in post processing that doesn’t happen if you just twist that ISO knob up.

I set up an a6300 with a Zeiss Loxia 21mm f/2.8 lens on a nice sturdy RRS tripod and aimed it at my bookcase. I set the ISO to 1600, attached a remote shutter release, and made an exposure with the f-stop set to 5.6, and the shutter set to give me some, but minimal slipping in the highlights. This produced a rather dark image when developed in Lr CC 2015.5 with custom white balance and default settings utherwise.

ISO 1600
ISO 1600

Then I made five more images progressively more underexposed in one-stop intervals:

One stop under
One stop under
Two stops under
Two stops under
Three stops under
Three stops under
Four stops under
Four stops under
Five stops under
Five stops under

Then I took the underexposed images as gave each of them a Lightroom exposure boost equal to the underexposure.

No boost
No boost
One stop boost
One stop boost
Two stop boost
Two stop boost
Three stop boost
Three stop boost
Four stop boost
Four stop boost
Five-stop boost
Five-stop boost

OK, the color twist isn’t bad, but what about the noise? I picked a section with some nice dark areas and blew it up to 200%:

No boost
No boost
One stop boost
One stop boost
Two stop boost
Two stop boost
Three stop boost
Three stop boost
Four stop boost
Four stop boost
Five stop boost
Five stop boost

There is a fair amount of noise in the four and five-stop boosted images. Note that they are the equivalent of in-camera exposures of ISO 25600 and ISO 51200, respectively.

I’ll be doing dome comparisons of in-camera-pushed versus post-pushed images. I just wanted to set the stage with this post.

 

 

 

 

The Last Word

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Comments

  1. Jack Hogan says

    March 17, 2016 at 12:21 pm

    Interesting, not isoless in this range

    Reply
    • Jim says

      March 17, 2016 at 12:42 pm

      Jack, in this test you can’t tell if it’s ISOless or not, because the exposures vary. I’m going to have to change the confusing title. Thanks.

      Reply
  2. CarVac says

    March 17, 2016 at 1:21 pm

    Of course, when pushing in camera you’ll run into baked in noise reduction.

    Reply

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