It's the age old dilemma, speed vs quality. In the film days it was "grain". In the digital age it's "noise". One of my favorite shooting subjects is animals in action and the trick is to freeze that action into an interesting photographic image.

I shoot most of my critters with a Nikon D200 and a Sigma 100-300 f/4 lens. I have found that in order to get the shutter speed (1/500 or better) to freeze the action and enough DOF to get things in focus, I use settings in the range of 1/800sec, f/6.3-8, and an ISO of 400. The dilemma comes in post processing (I shoot only raw images) when I usually have to crop for composition, adjust exposure and saturation, and sharpen. At ISO400, there is some noise and depending on how much of crop is necessary, this can get to be a bit of a problem. I have tried all the noise reduction programs and have settled on Neat Image which works really well as a plugin.

My problem is that often times I'm not sure whether I like the image better with noise reduction (NR) or with the "noise". So, I'm hoping I can get some opinions here on the following images of a hunting GBH. The first set are the whole image with and without NR. The second set are the 100% crops. I'd just like to get some feed back on which whole image you like better and why (It's OK if you really don't see much difference, it is subtle). Now I know that the web is not the best display method for judging these kinds of things, but it's all we have. Thanks for your feedback.

Native image (no NR)

Image with NR


Here are the 100% crops in which the NR effects are more visible.
Native

With NR