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dlw
Guest
Hi Walt.In 13 x 19 print, it looks excellent. In 16 x 20 it looks very good. As I've noticed in some other images from this camera, the noise can look peculiarly defined and tight, which in the 16 x 20 calls some attention to it. By contrast, the M8 noise is softer edged, blurrier. I have no idea what this is about. I upsized the 16 x 20 image in Alien Skin Blow Up with their default 100% sharpening, which they say only compensates for the increase in size and which I have found to be true with other images. Perhaps it slightly oversharpened this image.
Also, notice in the 13 x 19 100% crop that there are peculiar artifacts, JPEG like, and that they are gone in the 16 x 20. I don't know what to make of either of these issues. In the 13 x 19, do you think it might be the chroma NR or oversharpening in PS? As I said, the 13 x 19 print looks excellent and I can see none of this JPEG-like stuff in it. The 16 x 20 doesn't show that either, but shows the "sharp" noise when looking closely.
I played around a bit with the DNG that was posted in the Ricoh forum that Jorge mentioned and I have a much better understanding of what you're talking about now.
I can't say as I know what is going on, but I thought the noise pattern fluctuated quite a bit depending on how close to being properly exposed (which is expected, right?) and then responded quite a bit to different sharpening algorithms.
In Raw Developer you can choose between four sharpening techniques, my preferred is the R-L deconvolution, which I thought looked quite nice with these files - close to a warm color print using 400 speed film. But when I applied either Hybrid or USM sharpening I thought the noise texture got a little weird and started to remind me of reticulation, which is what your 13x19crop reminds me of.
All that aside, there is a basic noise pattern to the file at 200iso which I'm guessing different software will handle differently based on how the interpolation techniques get applied to the pattern. So, yes, I think what you're seeing could be a result of the sharpening in Photoshop and maybe some interpolation that Alien Skin has in their enlargement technique. You could try running the file out of ACR at a slightly higher resolution to get a larger image size and see what the difference is like.
Take care,
David