How to stop getting a grainy picture?

I don't know weather its the lighting. But i got bought some at christmas and no matter how much i changed the camera settings (not that i knew what i was changing fully) it just wouldn't go away. The picture was really grainy! How do you get rid of it? I have a Nikon D90 if thats any help.

Read your camera manual first. Then turn the ISO setting down and take it off of automatic. I suspect what you're seeing isn't grain, but noise. Noise goes up with higher ISO settings, so turning it down and off of automatic will likely help.

Your shots were probably indoors and hence with low light. So the camera used a high iso resulting in a noisy image. Your options are to add more light so a lower iso can be used, use a smaller depth of field i.e. Smaller F-stop 2.8 or 3.5, or use noise-removal software on your images however this will come at the cost of detail.

I'm no camera expert but try these links.

www.imageskill.com/articles/HTML/camer…

askville.amazon.com/grainy-pictures-digi…

The only answer to noise is light and lots of it. All sensors have a noise threshold the darker the ambient light the nearer you are to that ever present sensor generated noise. Raising the ISO often makes it worse, it will make your shutter speeds faster as the camera is more sensitive to light, but the closer you are to the sensor noise the worse it gets as raising the ISO amplifies the noise, literally. Only by lighting well above the sensor generated noise level will you get noise free images. You'll be surprised at how much light you need to avoid noise completely.

It used to be the larger the sensor the less sensor generated noise, and this is still broadly true, modern sensors are much better than older ones for this. The Sony sensor in my Pentax K5 and the Nikon D7000 are much better than most at this. But even these will still have noise when the light level is low. Even my Nikon D3s (probably the best DSLR for low noise) will still have some noise at low light levels.

You solved the problem when you said: "… No matter how much I changed the camera settings (not that I knew what I was changing fully) … ". As you've discovered, changing things without knowing what you're doing is the perfect recipe for poor pictures.

Its time for you to finally sit down and READ & STUDY the Owner's Manual for your camera and whatever lighting you bought at Christmas and learn how to make the camera and lighting work together to get the pictures you want.

These sites will help:

http://www.nikondigitutor.com/eng/d90/index.shtml Who better than Nikon to help you learn to use your Nikon D90?

http://rising.blackstar.com/using-an-off-camera-flash-to-improve-your-photos.html

If you received some sort of lighting kit instead of an off-camera flash unit you can Google how to use that type of lighting.

So begin the process of learning how to use your camera and learn what setting do what and how to use them to make the pictures you want to make.

This site has tutorials for the beginner to the professional:

http://www.digital-photography-school.com

Check that the settings on the camera aren't all set to AUTO

You have to be using (and be comfortable with using) a DSLR in P, A, S or M modes if you wish to get a desirable images. In these modes you will be able to tell the camera the ISO, and exposure you need.

There are two elements of keeping the noise down:

1) Keep the ISO speed down.

2) Expose to the right. This means you need expose a shot so that the brightest area of a scene you want to have detail, is just on the edge of hightlight clipping.

Secondly how you use continuous light is very different to how you use strobes. If you have continous light, you can only work with inanimate objects. If you want to shoot people then you need either huge amounts of continous light or strobes.

Lower you ISO Setting. The higher the number the grainer the picturre. But as a quick fix, load the photograph into photoshop and apply a "median" filter. It won't totally get rid of the grain, but it will soften it a bit.