Night photography tip: long exposure noise reduction

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

When it is dark, you will often need longer shutter speeds to take a good photo. Do you have noise reduction switched on in your camera, or not? High ISO noise reduction will not make much difference when taking photos. But watch out for long exposure noise reduction.

A high ISO value will often cause extra noise in your photo. Very long shutter speeds can also cause extra noise. Of course, you do not want that, and your camera has the option to do something about it. In fact, your camera has two noise reduction functions built in, each for a different purpose.

The standard noise reduction is intended for the noise caused by a high ISO value. This setting only applies if you photograph in jpeg. It filters the noise out of the jpeg produced by your camera.

If you use raw, the noise reduction setting will be stored in your raw file, but you can still choose to apply, adjust or disable this processing later. For the raw photographer, this setting in the camera is effectively not important.

There is also long exposure noise reduction, which is important for both jpeg and raw photographers. Long exposure noise reduction takes an extra photo without any light reaching the sensor. This records hot pixels, which are then automatically filtered out of the actual photo.

Long exposure noise reduction is often enabled for shutter speeds of 1 second or longer. Because an extra photo is taken without any light, a dark frame, taking the photo effectively takes twice as long. One second becomes two seconds. Thirty seconds becomes a minute.

Of course, this is not much of a problem until your shutter speed becomes really long. Just do the maths, one minute becomes two minutes. Five minutes becomes ten minutes. If your shutter speed is fifteen minutes, it will take half an hour for your photo to be taken.

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