Hi Shel, first, there is noise in the darkest areas of photos even in the latest Canon cameras :-) It's impossible to not have it in the Zones I-III without a cooled CCD, which is quite inconvenient on most DSLRs ;-)
Second, the default settings in Adobe converter in the second tab (detail?) leave much to be desired. It's sharpening is just simple and inadequate, it sharpens noise more than details, and the built-in noise reduction doesn't work well neither. Adobe itself recommends turning off sharpening completely in the ACR for files to be manipulated or printed very large. Third, the crops look like if the darker zones were pushed to the right, either by curves or "brightness" setting in ACR. Which of course shows the noise inherent in darker zones more. Fourth, I don't find it that bad ;-) especially after printing. The ACR luminance noise reduction slider doesn't work well, nor does chroma noise reduction. I would suggest setting all sliders in the detail tab to zero, and remove noise and sharpen after converting (preferably in 16-bit). NN or NI, one of which you say you used for scans, they both work quite well, if you tweak the default profiles (IMO their noise removal setting is too high, producing unacceptably plasticky files). For example, when I tried Noise Ninja, I used settings like these for iso 400 files (though for JPEGs!) LUMA: strength 2 smoothness 4-5 (local) contrast 10-11 (setting the contrast higher than neutral 10 sometimes brings back low-contrast detail which can be obliterated by noise reduction). CHROMA: 8/6/11 or 10/8/12 if the photograph is darker. Again, setting the local contrast especially in the chroma noise reduction helps bring back local colour saturation on features such as lips (especially lips and eyes loose saturation a lot when you apply chroma noise reduction too much). These figures are for JPEG files though, I guess there could be less with RAW files. Fra
