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I would like to ask for your opinion whether in your past experience you have seen similar kind of red noise in lower parts of your pictures in low-light settings?

It shows up in lower edge and corners. It comes out when this part of the composition is mostly black or dark and there is a low-light setting where I need to slightly increase the ISO.

Sample pictures:

https://imgur.com/a/qRDp28B

https://imgur.com/a/6ooL7tV

At first I thought I went too high with the ISO (on previous pics I have noticed this, the ISO was sometimes 1600) but this sample picture was shot at ISO 640, 18mm, f/3.5, 1/60 sec on a Nikon D5600 with 18-55mm kit lens.

/edit:

I added a new picture that I have processed in which I noticed unusual noise around lower/right edge. Picture parameters: ISO 1000, 18mm, f/3.5, 1/20 sec.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/FO36S.jpg

Of course I understand that normally one wouldn't push the exposure up so much, to create so much noise, but just for illustrating my noise issue I did it anyway... :) The right side looks like it is burned out from the very edge, whereas all other areas seem to have "normal/regular" noise.

/edit2: I have been in touch with Nikon and there has been some back and forth but the customer service agent seems to be reluctant to acknowledge that this could be a sensor issue, even though I proved that it could not be the lense by exchanging my 18-55m kit lens for a fixed 35mm prime lense and seeing the same results:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/sMe1s.jpg

Questions: Does anyone have any past experience with Nikon Customer Support? Is it unrealistic to expect that they will admit that it's likely an issue with the sensor? Also, is there any chance they will opt for replacing my camera body or would it be necessary for me to send it in for examining and possibly trying to repair? I have no past experience in this so I'm not sure what to expect. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

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    \$\begingroup\$ Hi Flo - With your agreement, someone with the necessary reputation here could inline those pictures directly into your question, so they would be part & parcel of it permanently. I wouldn't want to do that without your explicit agreement, but it's easily done. \$\endgroup\$
    – Tetsujin
    Nov 4, 2018 at 13:36
  • \$\begingroup\$ Have you excluded lens flare from some out-of-frame light source (lamp, something reflecting the sun, or strong infrared transmitter like someone else's focus assist light or an IR remote control or an IR-lit surveillance camera)? \$\endgroup\$
    – rackandboneman
    Nov 4, 2018 at 18:00
  • \$\begingroup\$ Are you saving the photos as JPEGs? Or as raw files and then processing them with an external application such as Lightroom or Nikon ViewNX 2? Do you have lens correction turned on? \$\endgroup\$
    – Michael C
    Nov 4, 2018 at 20:03
  • \$\begingroup\$ Hi, I have no issues with inlining, I wasn't aware it was possible. About external light-source which is not in the frame could cause this. Interesting idea, but generally these photos were taken outdoors with little urban activity in northern Norway while on a roadtrip. This red noise happened before as well but it became more apparent when I started processing my pictures from the trip and came to the pics where the sun was going dark and thus light became more scarce. The photos were all shot as RAW+JPEG and I process the RAW pictures in Lightroom with Lens correction. \$\endgroup\$
    – Flo
    Nov 5, 2018 at 15:16
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    \$\begingroup\$ How much did you push up the exposure in Lightroom? \$\endgroup\$
    – mattdm
    Nov 6, 2018 at 16:23

2 Answers 2

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So it seems I probably have the solution for this issue I was facing. When I made the sample pictures I was shooting in Manual mode with Active D-Lighting turned to Automatic. This meant that whenever the camera detected a high-contrast scenery it tried to use Active D-Lighting to compensate in the shadowy / dark parts of the picture.

Turning this feature off seems to solve my issues. Now I'm trying to reproduce it with little success, the only scenario which seems to show this is when I shoot a picture like the below and manually add in +2,65 exposure and reduce shadows in Lightroom. But I suppose this is not a very likely scenario and I can live with it for now... Though it does seem a bit unnatural to have such red-ish noise seeping from the bottom edge.

Sample noisy picture

/edit:

It seems that my underlying issue is not solved. Though it was made much worse by having Active D-Lighting turned to Automatic. What is most likely to have happened is that as days grew shorter my scenes were more likely to have less than ideal amount of light and my camera was turning Active D-Lighting on more and more often which made it much easier to spot this underlying issue.

Having shot a few pics today with Active D-Lighting turned off, I can still see this weird abnormal noise at the bottom edge. At least for now I have a way to make it less annoying by turning off Active D-Lighting, until I can send it in for repair.

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There are at least three issues here:

  1. Vignetting removal brightens the corners and makes any noise there more visible.
  2. Amp noise (amp glow) in the lower edge of the sensor. Long exposure noise reduction could help with this, but I think it only works on long exposures. Manually subtracting a dark frame would be the only option for these shutter speeds.
  3. Active D-Lighting:
    • Lessens exposure to protect the highlights (decreasing signal to noise ratio)
    • Brightens the shadows (makes noise more visible)
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