Looking for advice/opinion replacing Nikon 5700 with Nikon 8800, Please!

Ed Ruf commented courteously ...

Hi, Ed.

I'm interpreting your comment to mean that you downloaded
the PSP 9 trial version but didn't like it enough to pay
the upgrade fee. Am I right?

Everyone has their own threshold of pain, and likewise we
all have our own threshold of noise. My threshold of
scanner and digicam noise is very low, but haven't
investigated stand-alone pictures because I'm lazy and
don't want to do multiple steps in different apps, saving
to a non-lossy format in between.

I fell in love with PSP 9's DCNR, and I like it more and
more as I get better at using it. In PSP 8, I used Edge
Preserving Smooth, which I found quite useful. Of course,
like most noise reduction filters, EPS can have a serious
effects on image sharpness and detail.

So, I "test drove" EPS in comparison to DCNR and was
simply blown away at how easily I could kill the noise
with DCNR and how little damage it did to the
sharpness/detail. Besides digital noise, that I don't
suffer with all that much, I find DCNR to be outstanding
for scans of half-tone printed photos in books and
magazines.

There's a guy at Corel (Jasc) that is something like their
Chief Scientist, by the name of Kris Zaklika. He's perhaps
the most knowledgeable person I've ever run across when it
comes to raster or vector graphics. Of course, he knows
PSP 7/8/9 better than anyone on the planet, as well he
should.

His team at then-Jasc developed DCNR from scratch.
Naturally, he won't reveal the mathematical algorithms,
but he's expained enough about how to use it and why it
works, that one can deduce how the algorithms might be
designed.

With that as a long-winded pre-amble, I'm interested in
what you didn't like about DCNR. I don't have a hidden
agenda, I'm not a shill for Corel, and I have no intention
of "taking you on". I just want to learn.

I'll do that, Ed. Thanks for the heads up. As I may or may
not have mentioned, 5 MP is more than enough for me. Right
now, I'm shooting at the relatively coarse resolution of
1600 x 1200, then cropping and resizing down to 1280 x 960
for final save. That suits 99 44/100% of my needs.

On the rare occasions when I need to print larger than 4 x
6, for which there are enough PPI at 1280, I just use the
photographer's rule of increasing viewing distance as the
print size rises. I wouldn't expect you to agree with
this, but I've printed pictures as large as 13 x 19 with
my HP 1220C from itty bitty 1280 pictures - that's only 70
PPI. But, when viewed from maybe 5 feet, the look fine (to
me, at least!).

Whatever new camera I buy, I think I'm gonna up my
shooting resolution into the 2.5-3 MP range, and up my
save size to maybe 1400 x 1050.

I have no doubt whatsover that I could find a camera from
Pansonic, Sony, Konica/Minolta, Canon, Fuji, or others
that easily fit my needs for daylight shooting. I'm having
trouble finding something in a non-DSLR that can do
available light without excessive noise, and I haven't
done any test drives on the flash issue, which is the
primary reason to dump my 5700.

In the end, there just isn't any substitute for testing
any new camera under the shooting conditions I find
typical on the subjects I most like. No one can tell me
that for sure, but I highly value your opinion and the
opinions of others that have responded to my request for
advice. These are all valuable data points which will help
me reach a correct buying decision.

Thanks again for your perspectives and suggestions.

 

Correct. There are other new features in it besides the new noise filter,
however I've been evaluating other tools/wotkflow that allows me the
ability to work with the full range of raw files and also in other color
spaces and PSP9 is still lacking here. Right now I'm using Nikon Capture
and/or PSP8 with the limitations. I have times where I need to run noise
filtering on batches of images and NI allows this easily. Similarly Capture
allows quick batch processing of raw images for those times I need it. I'm
about to give Adobe PSE3 a try next. In the end I think I'll have two
different flows, one for batches when needed quickly and then some other
final editor. At work I really only need the editor, so right now that's
been PSP8.

That's when the batch capability of NI can be a help and also with the
slightly more costly upgrade you can also have the plugin which can be used
inside of your editor, so you have both options.

Same here. I've been in the comp......p-s-p group on/off and have read
Kris's draft describing PSP9's DCNR. Given more time I probably could get
good results with DCNR. It was more of given what I all ready had been
using for quite a while and the need for running batches of images, it
wasn't a total solution, so the upgrade wasn't justified. As I said above,
I'm still searching. There is also the buyout of JASC by Corel, which was
the deathnell of other products I used to use such as Micrografx Designer
and Picture Publisher.

Then you have an additional way to help high iso noise. Use the full
resolution of the camera, then down sample. This will also help quell the
noise along with the use of noise filtering as well.

Good luck.

 

[snipped in its entirety for brevity]

Hi, Ed.

Thanks for clarifying your position. Like just about
everything in digital photography and computer graphics
there never is a "right" answer to something as complex as
noise reduction.

Kriz Z gave me some early-on hints on how to use DCNR,
else I'd have given up on it long ago,too. The short
version of the answer is that you have to move the 3 noise
sampling cross-hairs around with your right mouse button
to where *you* think the noise is, not where DCNR thinks
it is when it does its initial auto sampling.

Once I figured that out, my scans (primary use for DCNR,
not usually digigams unless I'm dealing with high ISO or
underexposures) that are inherently noisy went from DCNR
strenghts above 30 to around 8-12. Thus, instead of my
resulting image looking like I'd applied Gaussian blur,
they are now needle sharp (well, you know, within the
realities of noise reduction).

I'll close by saying that I am a firm believer that it is
much better to be very good with an app that you know,
than to struggle along with mediocre expertise on an app
somebody told you was "good".