D60 noise reduction black frame?

[MikeDitz]

I was shooting some long exposures last night with a friend who was using his D2H, my camera (D60) doesn't seem to have any sort of black frame subtraction noise reduction like his does.

Am I missing something?

Mike

[ChuckWestfall]

The D60 doesn't use dark frame subtraction, but long exposures up to a couple of minutes are still very clean without it. One question for you: how long were your exposures, and did you compare results with your friend?

[MattWaehner]

I did some reading on astrophotography and tried some of the noise reduction techniques; my D60 did not show much benefit from dark frame subtraction performed in Photoshop.

What was effective was combining several identical exposures. For example, shoot four identical frames and stack them as layers with 25% opacity. Since the noise varies randomly from frame to frame, when averaged the noise fades considerably.

BTW, the astrophotographers were very fond of the D60- as of last spring when I did that research it was by far the best camera for long exposures outside of cooled chip models.

[Tom_Crowning]

[ QUOTE ]
I was shooting some long exposures last night with a friend who was using his D2H, my camera (D60) doesn't seem to have any sort of black frame subtraction noise reduction like his does.

Am I missing something?

Mike

[/ QUOTE ]

The D60 doesn't perform (and, in fact, does not need) dark frame
subtraction for long exposures. The exposure time is more limited
by amplifier heat which shows up (depending on the temperatur of
your environment) with exposure times longer than about 4 min as
purple color on the right side of the frame.
However, you can still take a dark frame with the lens cap on
and do it by hand, it's very easy.
Regards,
tc

[MikeDitz]

My exposures ranged from 3 to 8 minutes. I had the magenta color shift on the right edge. There were a lot "hot pixels" and some clumps of colorful noise. After running some filters it looked pretty good.

The nikon D2H images were cleaner but looked more "painterly".

Mike