5 Tips to Avoid Grainy Photos

Are you ready for 5 tips to avoid grainy pho­tos? We’ve all had it…the dread­ed grainy pho­to. Whether you call it grain, noise or pix­e­la­tion, we’ve all been there, and it is no fun! It can make a great pho­to go bad quick­ly. But I have some good news. It is avoid­able! I am going to share 5 tips on how to avoid grainy pho­tos, and all you need to do is imple­ment them and prac­tice them to start avoid­ing grainy photos.

Before I dive into how to avoid grainy pho­tos, let’s first talk about what caus­es the grain in your pictures.

There are a few fac­tors that could be caus­ing the grain in your images…your cam­era, not under­stand­ing how to shoot in cer­tain light, but the num­ber one cause of grain is ISO. Remem­ber your ISO set­tings con­trol the sen­si­tiv­i­ty of light com­ing into your cam­era. If you need a lit­tle refresh­er on ISO, just head over to the arti­cle I wrote about it, but sim­ply put, the high­er the ISO, the more light, and the low­er the num­ber, the less light. One down­side to more light is the dread­ed grainy photo.

You may be ask­ing, “how high is too high?” Well, that depends on your cam­era, and find­ing your “max” ISO is essen­tial in learn­ing to take great pho­tos, but the fol­low­ing tips will help you as well.

5 Tips to Avoid Grainy Photos

1. Keep Your ISO Low

Tip num­ber one in my 5 tips avoid grainy pho­tos is obvi­ous. Keep your ISO as low as pos­si­ble to guar­an­tee a good qual­i­ty pho­to. Nev­er use auto ISO, nev­er allow your cam­era to choose the ISO and always keep the ISO as low as pos­si­ble while main­tain­ing a per­fect­ly exposed image. Remem­ber, there are oth­er ways to achieve per­fect expo­sure, such as shut­ter speed or aper­ture, and using those instead of upping your ISO will help avoid grain.

2. Activate Noise Reduction

My sec­ond tip for you is to make sure you acti­vate noise reduc­tion on your cam­era if it has it. Remem­ber, not every cam­era has this abil­i­ty, but it is a great tool to use if your cam­era does and will absolute­ly reduce the grain.

3. Meter for the Brightest Spot

You know I love meter­ing. Well, tip num­ber 3 to avoid grainy pho­tos is to remem­ber that if you are shoot­ing in a sit­u­a­tion where you see your ISO climb­ing, try meter­ing on the bright­est spot in the viewfind­er. Change your meter­ing spot to the bright­est loca­tion in the viewfind­er and then meter from there. This sim­ple change can help improve the grain. 

4. Find More Light 

I am a nat­ur­al light pho­tog­ra­ph­er. I always say, “shoot for the light, and not the loca­tion.” Well, tip num­ber 4 is to find more light. Now, I don’t want you rush­ing out and buy­ing a zoom light or any oth­er off-cam­era light­ing set-up. I sim­ply want you to pay atten­tion and if you are tak­ing a pic­ture and you see the ISO climb­ing, move your sub­ject to where you have more light or use a reflec­tor to bounce light onto your sub­ject so that you can low­er your ISO.

5. Practice, Practice, Practice

And my final tip for you to avoid grainy pho­tos is to prac­tice! Mas­ter­ing low light pho­tog­ra­phy takes prac­tice, patience, more prac­tice and time. It does not come imme­di­ate­ly, so don’t get frus­trat­ed. Grab your cam­era, find some low light and prac­tice shoot­ing all dif­fer­ent sub­jects; sta­tion­ary and moving.

I would love to see your low-light shots and know if these 5 Tips to Avoid Grainy Pho­tos have helped with your pho­tog­ra­phy, so head over to the Learn Pho­tog­ra­phy with Dena Face­book Group and share them with me!

And, if you want to learn more about ISO, Aper­ture, Shut­ter Speed and how to get amaz­ing pho­tos today, check out the Begin­ners Pho­tog­ra­phy Essen­tials Class today!