NIK Dfine for night shoots

[rpcrowe]

I have recently joined a group of photographers who do night shoots here in the San Diego area and in our back country for star trails and night shoots of old abandoned farm buildings. I joined this group this because, although I generally prefer to shoot alone, I like the safety in numbers for night shooting. An old man like me carrying several thousand dollars of highly pilferable camera gear could easily be a target of bad guys...

Anyway, the group moderator, David Deligadillo, is an accomplished night and low light photographer. David uses NIK Dfine as his noise reduction program and does quite a good job. I found out at a group meeting last night that he employs no in-camera noise reduction and just does noise reduction with NIK Dfine. BTW: he always shoots RAW with a canon 5D....

I just thought that I would mention this...

[DanK]

I do the same. I use long-exposure (subtractive) NR when the circumstances permit and the exposures are long enough, but I never use regular in camera noise reduction because I always shoot raw. For my other photography, I rarely use any NR, and when I do needed it, I almost never use anything but LR now that its NR is so good. However, I recently started trying Nik for night shots, and while I have only started, so far I have been pleased. Unfortunately, NIK's file naming is useless (each time I invoke one of the filters, it just adds another "edit" to the file name), so I am not sure I used Define on the two below, but I think I did.