The relationship between what we want, the signal, to what we want to ignore, noise, is a constant factor of detecting and processing any electronic information, whether we’re looking at photography or sound recording, seismology,radar- literally any case of recording analog information. In the case of digital photography noise appears as random occurrences of red, green and blue pixels in the image. A very big function of the processor is to identify this noise, often a characteristic of a particular camera model, and eliminate it by blending it into the surrounding image information.

Starting with Nikon, lets take a look at how these processors handle the different camera models.

Nikon RAW Files

Nikon D3x: C1 Pro

Nikon D3x: ACR

Canon RAW Files

Canon 5D Mk II: C1 Pro

Canon 5D Mk II: ACR

Olympus RAW Files

 

Olympus PEN E-P1: C1 Pro

Olympus PEN E-P2: ACR

Across the board, we’re seeing Adobe perform better than Phase One in handling noise issues. The most telling chart is the “Noise Power”, indicating noise effects that are going to be visible to the normal viewer, and the Adobe Camera RAW samples are significantly lower, and more incorporated. That is, there is less separation of the three channels, the curves are considerably smoother, resulting in less of an appearance of noise.