The ISO is controlled by the sensor. So it is the sensor and every camera to captures light. And the ISO can increase the amount of light or decrease the amount of light it's measuring electronically. So it's an electronic measurement. And it takes its history from the film days. So ISO electronically boosts the light signals.
Most cameras have a base ISO, and you might be surprised where that is. Most people assume it's 100. And a lot of cameras have a base ISO 100 but a lot of other cameras have a slightly different style in place it centers are different, but typically 100 is your base ISO. What that means is when you shoot with ISO 100 that's the Most natural setting for the sensor. anything after that is you are electronically boosting the signal. The more you boost the signal, the more electronic noise you get actually in your image.
So ISO 12,800 is very noisy, you might have a camera only goes up to 6400 or phase 100. This is an old one. And that will be very noisy. When you take an image you'll see lots of really horrible electronic noise. More expensive cameras have noise, but the noise looks quite nice. So there is a place for using noise but typically we don't want noise in our image.
So ISO 100 will be very clean. So ISO boosts the light, but the problem with it so when you base a lie, it introduces lots of noise. So there's a downside. So we might think great whenever I'm in a dark situation, I'm just going to bang the ifl up. And that is going to help us to expose and get to the middle of our exposure and get our histogram. Correct.
But well, now we're going to have a corruption in the image. With noise, we're going to show you what that looks like. Quick note, the more you pay for your camera, the better ISO performance it has essentially. And the more modern a camera is, the better it performs on an ISO typically. So as a commercial photographer, I shoot with a Canon five D Mark free, because I say 12,800 I can actually use a push I need to that means that my five D Mark two which is the older version of that camera, I wouldn't shoot above ISO 1600 because after that, I'm starting Get a lot of noise with the five D Mark free however, I personally some photographers will disagree with me on this, but I personally will push myself to ISO 6400 when I need to. Knowing that I'll be able to pull the image back a little bit imposed.
Now noise loses details if it's a very detail show, I wouldn't do that. So my new camera has two stops of light advantage over my old camera. And that was one of the reasons I bought the camera. So that tends to be when new cameras come out. The real main improvement is ISO. That's what we'll buy.
There are other things like dynamic range and all these things you'll have toasts talking about, but usually we want a good ISO performance. Now I might only go to 3200 on my five D Mark three, but 3200 is practically clean so the sensor doesn't create as much noise as the previous sensor and I in the five D Mark, too. So that's why sometimes we'll push ourselves as commercial photographers to have better eyes. So if you're starting out and you're hobbyist Don't worry about it and get a relatively new consumer level camera. And they tend to have fairly good ISO performance these days. So let's have a look a couple of image that will display the difference in noise.
Now, you might struggle to see this when you're watching the training, but I'm hoping you can see how noisy This is in the grays and whites and in the blacks. Now, this is a shot with a lot of noise in it and I want you to just to see what noise was looking like. Now, most monitors don't display blacks very well. But if your monitor is a good one, you may well see in the blacks here, there's so much noise and That's where you tend to get caught out a lot of the time is in the blacks. So in the shadows, the better cameras will perform better, there'll be less noise. But the less expensive cameras won't do very well in the shadows.
Now this image was very clean, it's very crisp, it might not show that way on the screen. But this had was taken with a very low ISO, there was a lot of light, it was very sharp, and there was no background noise. After my screen here, I can see that the image is creating some bands. But that's just the way that the image is displaying on my equipment as I'm recording this course. So, have a look on the internet. See if you can find some different images.
And you will see which ones are noisy and which ones are clean and that will tell you what So they were shorter. And please also bear in mind the ISO comes from the old film days. If you're wondering why it's called ISO, go back old film used to be measured stops of light in ISO. So have a look on Wikipedia and investigate if you want to know a little bit more about why it's called ISO but for the purpose of this course, ISO, is electronic boosting or compensation for light