High noise at Low ISO's

[riley989]

Particularly in photos with large areas of similar colour, at lower ISO's (400) I'm getting quite a large amount of noise from my 60D. Looking online at 100% crops from the same camera, I can't find any pictures with as bad noise for the same ISO's. Here is a couple 100% crops form some 400 ISO pictures.










I'm not normally one to pixel peep, but under some processing (HDR for example, upping contrast etc) the noise becomes far more noticeable.

Could there be something wrong with my sensor, or the way I'm processing these photos?

[JED]

Have these been sharpened? Sharpening areas of low tone will result in the noise becoming more obvious.
These also look like relatively dull areas so the exposure is probably quite low.
What other processing have you done to these files?

[Arthurhh]

What are you using for PP. What EXIF can you provide for the images. This info may help someone more experianced than me answer your question. I have noticed similar issues when pushing my luck with light levels using the 60D

[chrisgin]

If the photos were underexposed and you had to brighten them in PP then that would explain it. Do you get the same problem when shooting in brighter light?

[riley989]

Shot in RAW then straight into lightroom. Only processing was lens correction, then exported to .jpeg, with no shaprening. I did notice in lightroom the sharpening slider is defualt set to about 20 when I import photos. I can check the EXIF data when I get home, but I can tell you they where either taken in Av or P mode with auto exposre with matrix metering mode.

[rjd]

You will get noisy shaddows if you under expose them at ISO 400 if you pixel peep.

Post the whole frame, default conversion(as above) in a reasonably large size.

[MikeW]

The less light hitting your sensor, the higher a percentage of noise you're going to get (low signal-to-noise ratio). In low light, or if you underexpose your images, you'll have noise, even at the lowest ISO.

It also affects the blue channel more than any other, so noise in blue skies is quite normal

Make those exposures a bit longer, expose to the right, and noise will go away

[riley989]

Thanks for the help, and here are the full frames of the above three crops (click for larger view):