Sony A7RII – what do I think of the quality?

I’ve not done much outdoor shooting yet, but I wanted to try the new Sony in a more difficult setting – a backlit indoor shot using natural light. I have the Sony set to ISO 100 unless the shutter speed is going to be less than 1/60th second, in which case, it moves to Auto ISO (nice feature!). This tricky lighting condition with a sunlit window in the background and exposure compensation set to +1, meant that the final exposure was 1/60th at F6.3 with ISO 2000. The shot out of the camera looked like this:

Straight out of the camera as Raw image

When I finished processing in Lightroom, I ended up with this. I lightened all shadows and then applied a brush to her face and lightened the shadows there as well. I dropped the highlights to get rid of the over exposure in the window.

After processing – image is 5700 x 4600 pixels

100% crop on the face to look at the noise:

100% crop after noise reduction in LR

I think that is pretty good. I downsize before uploading to stock agencies – with something like this I would reduce to 4000 pixels on the long edge, which will reduce any apparent noise even further. If you click the image to see the 100% crop, you will see a small red edge to her face – I think those are the compressed Raw file artifacts that people have mentioned. I suspect that if I had used uncompressed Raw, those wouldn’t have been there. Not sure they are very objectionable though after I downsize. So my first test of the Sony seems to have come out with flying colors.