Re: Jitze / Chris - Camera Thread

Jitze Couperus wrote:

tony cooper wrote:

Go to the chapter on setting White Balance in the non-automatic modes.
It's probably the most important part of the manual for someone coming
off film.

Indeed - some people really swear by this, others set the highest
priority on the need to calibrate your monitor (and printer if you're
fixing to make good prints)

Frankly, I've hardly bothered with either of these things as most
times I find I have to post-process the image anyway, and I might as well do everything together at the same time. Sometimes it can be a very subtle tweak. For example, there are 2 images on the page at

http://home.znet.com/couperus/Stuff/PT17.htm

They are both the same photo, but the first is as intialy
delivered by the camera - but I didn't like the depth of
the shadow under the wings. So I tweaked the linearity
of of the response in the darker regions and ended up
with the second picture - much less murky muddy
darkness around the wheels... In essence the original
scene had too much dynamic range for the camera
to handle (from very bright sun to deep shadow)
so I helped it a bit to respond like the human eye
would.


I read all articles downstream by John, Harvey and Tony.
Your input, all of you, is truly appreciated.

Color management is a problem related to web publication.

We have a very nice scanner, a Microtek i900 which is
the best, in my experience. I calibrate our scanner
every seven days using Kodak Q-60 target sheets, one
for reflective scans and one positive transparency
for film scans.

http://www.kodak.com/global/en/professional/products/films/catalog/kodakProfessionalQ60Targets.jhtml

We have thousands of 35mm color slides, almost all shot with
Kodachrome 64 film. Calibrating our scanner really helps with
keeping colors in balance with Kodak standards.

Sometimes I think I take this photography and web publishing
a bit too seriously. I can be very anal retentive.

Problem with web publishing is primarily monitor based. Until
last year, we used CRT monitors. Now we have all Dell flat
screen monitors which produce significantly more dynamic colors.

Years back, I learned photographs processed on Mac computers would
be too dark for an IBM machine. Just the opposite is true, IBM images
too bright for Mac systems. Some of this I contribute to a CRT monitor
simply becoming "tired" and losing brightness and color. This is no
longer true. Almost all have upgraded to newer systems and all brands
of systems are now very much standardized.

I know you boys remember web pages labeled,

"Best viewed at 800 by 600 pixels."

Today, over the past five or so years, I do not come across this
message. This viewing setting is antiquated.

This problem today is how to calibrate your monitor (and system) to
serve the most common calibrations out there on the web, this is,
what are common settings people use? For this, I elected to stick with
default settings for our Dell monitors and default settings for our
Windows XP systems. I suspect a large majority of computer users
will have default settings for color management. I would like to
tweak some settings, but this would cause problems with colors
for this majority of people using default system settings.

Another problem is simply brightness and contrast settings for
a monitor. For this, I stick with default settings believing a
majority of people will be using default settings.

A side note is our midi files have a wonderful sound, when played
on a Win98 machine with an older Soundblaster board. We switched
over to XP systems, now our midi files sound like crap; my cello
now sounds like a French horn. I bought a fancy Soundblaster board
to replace the XP sound board. My cello still sounds like a French
horn which is distressing. No matter the tweak, I cannot have our
XP systems faithfully reproduce a cello as in the "golden days."
So, now I am going through our midi files and adding a blend of
viola and violin to return a more true cello sound.

Same principle applies to color management. For this reason, because
of modern systems not having as good of quality for both color and
for sound, I stick with default settings then tweak my files around
those default settings.

--
Purl Gurl
--
So many are stumped by what slips right off the top of my mind
like a man's bad fitting hairpiece.
.