Re: Adobe Lightroom 3.0 and DxO Optics Pro 6.2 Test

"Pete" <available.on.request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:2010061116183024201-availableonrequest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Hope some of this will be useful. Not a lecture, just sharing my
thoughts...

Your G9 seems very good. I generally set my camera to auto white balance
and the picture controls to standard. The camera JPEG is my "high-tech
processed" reference. If I can do better by editing the RAW output then
I've quite done well as an amateur.

It's too easy to get bogged down with sharpening, especially with
wide-angle shots. I have a book showing pictures of my local area: none of
them are sharp, but they are superb and delightful. The colours, textures,
and natural lighting steal the show. Most of them were shot on medium
format film. The photographer took advantage of this format by using
heavily stopped down lenses: diffraction limited the resolution giving
virtually infinite depth of field; the long exposure time added softness
to areas of movement - water and everything swaying in the breeze. In the
same way that some artists use this effect in their paintings.

Yes, with film the colour and tone ware baked in. Luckily, I acquired a
set of colour balancing filters marked in the mired scale (never managed
to remember the Wratten numbers), which saved many shots from the rubbish
bin and paved the way to understanding digital.

As I'm sure you know, there is rarely a right or a best edit of a shot.
While experimenting with the many degrees of freedom it's all too easy to
get stuck in a local minima. Having a break or another distraction is the
best way to get out of it, even it's just concentrating on colour instead
of sharpness.

I have a particular hatred of too much cyan, to such an extent that if the
sky really was cyan I either delete the image or change the chroma in that
region. With that defect in mind, if you would like my opinion about
colour in your photos, just ask.

Some good comment there.

On the Canon G9 I always shoot raw and superfine. Jpegs are set to Canon
Neutral with the noise and sharpening turned down. It's always there as a
reference and can be post-processed if the raw is lost. Canon's app produces
camera identical images from the raws but better quality.

I only played with a camera a few times when I was young and arrived late to
the digital party so it's taken a while to get my head around the
differences between film and digital. My Canon A590 was adequate as a start
but wasn't the greatest. The G9 was such a leap I never bothered much with
noise and sharpening until now.

I had a mess the other week and after trying some Lightroom presets saw more
clearly how it made a difference. I spent the last week trying to get the
hang of both so when Lightroom 3 came out it was no bother to give it a spin
and compare it with Optics Pro. It was a bit of a roadcrash but I've got a
better grip on the technicalities and aesthetics.

It looks like I can get a colour match in Optics Pro if I use one of the
Canon profiles (which I never noticed earlier) and white balance the shots
on a target. Something for you next time? I've also found since then that
LR3 and DxO swap subjective sharpness depending on whether you print sharpen
them which was a surprise. LR3 was way closer to DxO then.

I've read the accounts on Luminous Landscape of comparing a G9 to a MF
camera and out and about in Japan. Given its limitations and proper care
getting technically good and viewer acceptable images isn't a problem. When
I've had a break and got my head out of my ass I might take another run at
this. It's easy to obsess this stuff and lose sight of having fun.

--
Charles E Hardwidge

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: New Canon S3 IS
    ... didn't seem to measure up to the Canon S2 1S or the Sony DSC H1. ... country and I already had the batteries and memory to fit this ... Now, I want more zoom, decent action shots, ... It would be nice if the next camera uses AA ...
    (rec.photo.digital)
  • Re: No magazine has had a real showdown
    ... Then you wouldn't feel the need to post shots made ... Some pictures here from 5D canon, 20D Canon, FZ20 Panasonic and Olympus ... Australia call the 5D a consumer camera too. ... Last year I shot 2/3rd of a wedding with my FZ20 when the DSLR I had ...
    (rec.photo.digital)
  • Re: aerial photography (was Re: Stop Making Sense)
    ... I recently got Canon 20D (I've been a camera nut and Canon user for MANY years) and am very happy with it. ... The stabilization greatly reduces the effect of the typical airplane vibration. ... you can see the edge of the window in a few of the shots. ...
    (rec.aviation.owning)
  • Re: Canon Reliability
    ... I plunged for a Canon DSLR 18 months ago thinking I would be getting a reliable ... I have taken about 1000 shots with it before I got the err99 fault and the internal flash ... Took it to Colchester Camera Repair they said it is a ...
    (rec.photo.digital)
  • Re: No magazine has had a real showdown
    ... Then you wouldn't feel the need to post shots made ... Some pictures here from 5D canon, 20D Canon, FZ20 Panasonic and Olympus ... Australia call the 5D a consumer camera too. ... Last year I shot 2/3rd of a wedding with my FZ20 when the DSLR I had ...
    (rec.photo.digital)