Bill Funk wrote:
On Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:07:02 +1100, "Wayne J. Cosshall"
wrote:
Hi All,
I've posted a new column article, called "Why Do Some Fear Photoshop and
Others Think Digital Photography is Something Special?" to my site at:
http://www.dimagemaker.com/specials/dimw.php
Cheers,
Wayne
An interesting treatise.
I agree, it's interesting. I recently went digital. The experience,
after a long vacation and about 1000 shots, 500 of them not discarded
on the spot, was about as expected.
First, I had expected to have to adjust for "expose for the highlights"
instead of "expose for the shadows" which I had previously use (for color
negative film.) This turned out to be true, very true, and very imnportant.
Second, I had expected that the autoexposure in the camera would be better
than the camera I had previously used (a Minolta X-700). This was true,
using the Canon 30D's "evaluative metering", but still, the camera did a bad
job on shots of glaciers or cloudy skies, very bad. I had to use the
histogram a lot and be paranoid about checking it and using the "exposure
conmpenation" wheel.
Third, as I had never used autofocus, I had wondered how good it would be.
I had expected that for really 3D images, using only the central focus spot and
focusing on the desired point, button half down, then moving to the desired framing, it would
work real nice. It did. I had expected that it would work well focusing
on a scene which was all at infinity. It did not, on the whole, do as well as
I expected. Even with the crummy focus screen, I could often do better
by hand. I had not expected that **the** critical "autobracket" feature, which the
30D lacks, would be focus bracket. I'm not sure why this vital feature is missing.
The autofocus at infinity was OK for f/16 or f/11, but not for f/5.6 or f/4
(for zoom lenses). For my 50 mm f/1.7, it seemed completely reliably OK only at f/8 for more.
For closeups (e.g. flowers) I had expected to need to use manual focus and
focus my moving the camera, and this turned out to be true.
Fourth, I had expected that underexposed shots would in general be
fixable if saved as RAW, and that was true.
I had not expected that I would be playing with the ISO setting as often as I did. This is a whole
new dimension to photography. It would not be necessary, of course, if the camera had
an amplifier/ADC system that captured the whole dynamic range of the sensor, from
1 electron to full wells, in one go. I found myself setting the shutter speed and
f/number by hand and adjusting the ISO for correct exposure. This was a very strange
experience. It did work, though.
And then there is IS. I had heard it touted ... but had not expected the absolutely
amazing miracles that I experienced. Handheld exposures of 1/2 second at 70 mm focal
length, with my hands steadied on a window sill ... and they turned out quite useable
and sometimes perfect .... that's a miracle.
Finally ... there is Photoshop. I have used it a lot with scanned images.
But with digital and RAW it is even better. The 18-55 kit lens that comes with
the 30D is widely accused of being crap. It does have crappy ... very crappy ...
lateral chromatic aberration at wide angle ... but that is trivially fixed
with the camera raw import section of Photoshop. That fixed, I'm quite happy
with this lens. It's not the 50 mm f/1.8 prime, but it's OK.
The RAW import feature of PS for the 30D works wonders. I love it.
I'm a tweeker, and it lets me get close to what I want in the linear domain,
with no "shoulder" to the exposure, and I love that. The color temperature
correction feature works perfectly, and I love that. I love playing with
the "sharpness" setting to get it just right. I hate seeing picture with
obvious white rings around black objects, or vice versa. Using this feature,
I can set the sharpness just below that horror, and below the "too much noise"
level, and still get a nice sharp image. I did not expect this to work
as well as it does. Finally, on my recent vacation I took many photos
of glacier scenes, which are, always have been, and always will be, hard to
print. I found that the gradient mask combined with the "filter, sharpen,
unsharp mask, radius = 250, amount in the 20-50 range" works wonders.
The unsharp mask with a big radius and a modest amount is a great tool for
under contrasty scenes. Finally ... with PS now working on 16 bit images,
one does not have to worry about overprocessing resulting in those damn
quantization artifacts. One merely needs lots of memory and a fast machine.
I'm thinking of upgrading my PC to a dual processor 3 GHz machine
with 4 gigs of memory.
And then there are panoramas. I used to love large format. I tried
Hugin on some panoramas I took, and the results are great. Next time
I'll take a small tripod and try 2-D panoramas. This time I did only
1-D ones.
That's my take on just going digital.
Doug McDonald