Avoiding Noise

If you are wanting to get into microstock photography, then you hopefully know what noise in an image is. If you don’t, however, then you are about to learn what it is and how to avoid it.
There are a lot of blog posts and tutorials out there that attempt to inform you on how to remove noise from your images. In all reality, if you are shooting for microstock, you should make your best attempt to avoid it all together. Avoidance of noise is always going to be easier (and give you better results) then removing it.
Ok, back to the point. Images are made up of pixels. Pixels are tiny squares that represent a color/tone in an image. If your camera is an 8 megapixel camera then you have 8 million pixels that make up each image (example: one of my cameras is about 8.2 megapixels and it produces images that are 2336×3504 pixels). Pixel sensitivity is controlled by ISO on your digital camera. The lower the ISO, the slower the pixels respond to light and the more accurate the results are. The higher the ISO, the faster the pixels respond and the results become slightly less accurate.

Noise is very similar to film grain on a 35mm negative. It appears as a bunch of spots throughout areas of the image. You can usually only see noise in an image if you are zoomed in to 100%. Here is how noise relates to ISO settings. As the ISO goes up, so does the noise in an image. Therefore, if you want to avoid noise, use the lowest ISO setting you can at all times. I recommend 100-200 for ISO when shooting specifically for microstock. Of course, every camera is different and every lighting situation is going to give you different results, so expirment with what gives you the best results when shooting for microstock.
There are ways to reduce noise in an image, too. If you are shooting RAW then you have a bit of room to work with. In whatever RAW converter you are using (such as Lightroom, Camera RAW, Aperture, Digital Photo Professional, etc) there should be an area where you can fine tune sharpness and noise reduction. These two controls usually go together because as noise reduction goes up, sharpness goes down. They directly relate to each other, so don’t reduce noise to point where you lose sharpness! There is a lot of info out there about noise reduction, how to do it properly, what software to use, etc, etc. In my opinion you should try to avoid noise as much as possible but when you do need to reduce it use your RAW converter and make minor adjustments to the noise reduction levels until your image looks sufficient when viewed at 100% magnification.