Photography

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A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.

This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.

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Where does noise really come from? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by VexTheMaster@alien.top to c/photography@viewfinder.pro

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I know, I know, it can be caused by various factors, like high ISO, poor lighting conditions, long exposure time, heat. (not that I know why the last two cause noise)

But where does noise REALLY come from? What is noise? What does it have to do with photons and photosites?

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[–] SkoomaDentist@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

With modern cameras the noise is mostly inherent randomness in the number of photons that hit that particular pixel. If you want to find the ”real” root cause, it’s simply the random behavior of the light source which sends out photons at some rate (aka brightness) where the time and direction of each individual photon is random.

The more photons that pixel collects, the more that randomness is averaged out and thus the less noisy the image is.