Let me start by saying- WOOOOHOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!
As you might have guessed, I have found something awesome. The answer to a total prayer. Ok, it isn't an answer to the what body to upgrade to question, but something that will save me infinitely more time and improve my turnaround and quality of life.
Shooting circus and other performances means I need to use fast shutter speeds in generally craptastic lighting situations. This means I need to really push my ISO up. Which (maybe it won't be such a problem when I make the previously referred to upgrade) means NOISE. Lots of noise. Not really problem, with the D3200 and my collection of 2.8 zooms I can shoot at ISO 3200 and kill the boise in post. Right? Easier said than done (spoiler alert.... until now)
Actually, this was kind of a revelation to me a few gigs ago, I was comparing my shots with another photographer who shot the same show on the same night. Her images were much cleaner than mine, so I asked what settings she was shooting. Shana Siler was kind enough to introduce me to the wonderful world of noise reduction software. Seriously, I am that new to digital, I didn't know you could fix that later, I thought you were pretty much stuck with what you shot. Thank goodness for awesome and helpful people to school the newbie.
Being a mac guy and not having the time/money/desire to really become a photoshop guru, I chose to stick with Aperture for my workflow. Built in noise reduction isn't really that great, and I didn't want to deal with exporting to photoshop just for NR, so I started looking for plug-ins. Found a couple that were pretty darn good, DeNoise and Dfine 2.0. Both are excellent and let me shoot at any ISO my camera is capable of without worry. The trouble is that even after editing down to the best of the best, for a given performance I usually come out with about 100 or so shots worth posting. Denoise requires me to process each shot individually. And it takes a minute or so per shot. Not fun. Dfine sort of lets me do a batch process, but I still have to click through each shot in the batch and let the program analyze the shot and store the result, then do a batch save at the end. A bit faster but still less than ideal. There are a lot of reviews out there for the two programs, but from my limited testing, DeNoise worked better and gave me cleaner images, Dfine was not as great but was much faster for groups of images. So my workflow wound up being split. The very best shots from a given set, the ones I want to post to my gallery, I would process individually with DeNoise. The rest of the set, the ones I was posting just for the client, I would "batch" process with Define. You can see the results of this process in the Being Loved and Angel's Gift galleries here. It works, but it is very time consuming. If it wasn't for boring nights stuck on a ship either on duty or out to sea, it would take me forever to finish a project. What I really wanted was to be able to select an entire collection, start a plug in running to cut the noise, and get an alert when it was done. But I hadn't been able to find this mythical beast..... yet.....
After a one of my first posed portrait shoots with my beautiful girlfriend and out cute and very photogenic son, she complained about her skin. Even though I disagreed, as any intelligent boyfriend with a desire to continue to have a hot girlfriend would have, I started looking for plug-ins that would handle that task. I found a free trial of Potraiture, from Imagenomic. Stupidly expensive, but I tried the free trial and it totally rocked. If I ever start shooting portraits with any regularity, I am going to drop the money on this plug-in. Actually, if I go with the D600 upgrade option and have some left over money I may get it anyway just to have it lying around. It's pretty awesome. I am sure someone proficient with photoshop could do better, but for a one click solution for the lazy, yeah, it rocks. The neat thing about portraiture is that it is a true batch process. Select x number of pics, set the settings you want or tell it to auto set each image in the batch, hit save all, grab a cup of coffee or run a 5k, come back and it's done.
I couldn't help but notice they also had a noise reduction plug in, Noiseware. Hm... thought I, if one of their plug ins offers true batch functionality, why wouldn't the rest? Maybe it's worth a trial run. So I downloaded the trial. Lo and Behold.... it works exactly the same. True batch functionality. And so far at least, the noise reduction seems to be as good, if not better, than either of the other two contenders. But hold crap. I can set it once and just let it run while I do other things... a bargain at a million times the cost...... The first gig i have used this one on is one I can't post publicly, but I will update this as soon as I have something I can, but it's great. I am still grouping the batches by acts, similarly lit and shot segments, I haven't tried it over a whole gamut yet, will have to go back and do that later as a fun experiment, but just being able to take the computer and photo drive to work, set 45 shots or so processing, go to a meeting, come back, set the next 30 or so processing, no fuss, is awesome. It let me get the pics from the private gig up at least three days sooner than I would have been able to do with the prior work flow. Have to say I am happy with this find and highly recommend it!
Ok- update. Here are the first round of Noiseware Processed shots. These were shot at ISO 3200, which is pretty noisy on the D3200. Each act was processed as its' own batch. I used either the full or the strong noise automatic preset depending on whether it was a spotlight number or one of the darker ones. So these are pretty much my quick, heavy handed use of the program's automatic features. All three plug ins have auto options as well as lots of manual ones I am sure would give me a bit better results, but that is on the growing list of things to learn more about and experiment with later.
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