First I'd like to say that I've watched Brian Mosley's video about the E-P2 a few times and think he did a great job with them. I do have a couple of questions. Brian recommends setting both the Noise filter and the Noise Reduction to the off positions. Is this because he normally shoots raw and controls noise reduction himself? For a person who would rather shoot jpeg, wouldn't it be better to have the Noise Filter set to standard? Thanks for the advice and once again, if Brian reads this, great job on the videos.
The noise reduction and filters wouldn't effect RAW files anyway, so I assume he is recommending this for jpgs.
I just can't understand why you wouldn't want some kind of in-camera noise reduction for jpegs. The Olympus (Panasonic) sensor isn't noted for being the cleanest and without some kind of in-camera noise reduction it seems like you'd have to run a lot of jpeg pictures through a noise reduction program. naturally, I could be wrong.
Noise reduction in camera wil never be as good as in the PP stage. Generally NR will effect detail and sometimes smearing. If you do this in camera, you are stuck with what the camera gives you. In the PP stage, you can always have more control and work on your files in a non- destructive way.
Noise reduction certainly does affect the raw files. The camera takes a dark exposure of the same length immediately after the photographic exposure, and uses it to detect and remove sensor noise. This processing is done before the raw file is saved. Noise reduction is very effective, but doubles the length of time to make a single photograph. With very long exposures, it becomes very noticeable. Worth it, in my opinion, although perhaps if one plans to take several shots in the same session then a single dark frame could be applied in post. The noise filtering happens in the JPEG engine.
Noise reduction carried out on the RAW file by image processors such as Lghtroom etc. will inevitably be superior to that carried out in camera. However noise reduction carried out on processed files, such as jpgs, will often not be as good as that done by the cameras own processing engine as at least that is dealing with the full data from the sensor rather than a massively reduced set of data in an eight bit jpg. This obviously varies according to the engine used by particular cameras. However if processing files in camera (shooting jpgs) post processing these files inevitably leads to loss of quality for many other reasons. If you want jpgs from the camera, then use camera settings to process them and leave them alone as far as possible afterwards. If you want to process your own images then use the RAW file.
Not all cameras do this and it is used for long exposure in order to deal with heat generated noise. It is not affected in any way by the camera noise reduction settings. The noise reduction set in camera are applied to the RAW file in the camera to make a jpg. Irrespective of what setting you have in camera the RAW file will render the same in processors that ignore meta data settings from the camera (such as LR). The settings do affect the jpg preview that you see on the screen, so when shooting RAW you may want to make some of the jpg output choices that match your intent.
In the E-P1, specifically, there are two noise options. The dark frame option is directly and exclusively affected by the first of these, the "noise reduction" option. It can be turned off or on (or set to auto, where it is only used for long exposures). This does affect the raw file. I had several hot pixels that only manifested in raw files on long exposures without noise reduction. This noise reduction method cannot be replicated afterwards using raw processing, unless you happened to take a dark frame at the time and applied it yourself. Noise filtering is the second option on the E-P1, and is a software filter, applied during JPEG processing. This appears to be what you are talking about when you say noise reduction. When you originally said "noise reduction and filters" I assumed you were aware of the fact that there are two options on the Pens, but might not have understood that they're very different.
