Bought a Fuji S5 - Why am I getting poor image quality?

[Crawn2003]

I purchased a Fuji S5 last Friday for a fashion event that I had to shoot this week. I've been setting it up and for the life of me, the images I've been taking with it are horrible when zoomed in (and I'm not talking zoomed in to the actual picture, maybe 2X). They looked VERY noisy or grainy.

I thought I'd found the problem with the JPEG because you need to set a certain DPI (72-3000DPI) in one of the settings. I thought this would fix it but when I use RAW it's still horrible with the graininess.

I've made sure about the ISO (used 100-400 ISO only) and picture quality (JPEG - Fine w/ large setting and RAW). I've gone through the manual twice and nothing seems to touch on exactly what I'm having a problem with.

I've also left the "film type" on standard (this is a feature of the S5 to emulate a certain type of Fuji film). The only thing I can think of is that the S5 has automatic noise reduction but I don't see how Fuji would let a product out the door with this turned on and possibly creating my problem with the image quality.

Help! If you need something clarified please post!

~Crawn

 

[Aea]

Could you post a picture and give us an example, I am not expert on digital photography, but I am curious as to how the output looks.

 

[arogge]

Post an example of your problem. The "DPI" is not relevant to the image capture. This setting is only used when printing.

 

[CrackedButter]

I hate to sound negative but you should have bought the camera sooner, you don't buy a new camera and use it right away for something important otherwise you'll be in the situation you are in now. You got to get to grips with the thing first.

 

[compuwar]

It's likely you're underexposing. The S5Pro (I'm assuming that you're talking about the DSLR) is a very good camera, so you need to check your exposure against a histogram. I'd start with half black and half white and go from there- posterboard is a good thing to check against. Changing metering modes or exposure compensation as necessary should help. If you can't evaluate a histogram, it's time to Google.

The higher up the DSLR chain you go, the more you need to understand exposure. In digital, the most noise comes from the most underexposed part of the image, so if you don't nail exposure, you're going to get noise. You need to expose as far right as possible in camera without blowing the highlights you want detail in[1], and adjust in post if necessary.

Finally, if you're looking at 200%, it'll look like crap, just like looking under a microscope at film isn't representative of much. Look at the pictures at the resolution and in the output medium that you're going to use them in to evaluate nose.

In HDR mode, the Fujis have about 11 usable stops of information, so if you're exposing properly and the camera isn't faulty, you should get extremely good pictures, especially at the sensor's base ISO.

[1] Contrary to popular belief, it's ok to blow some highlights in some images.