Can anyone tell me what causes this?

These artifacts are consistent with insufficient bits required to represent the continuous change of the tone of the light. The result is a discontinuous representation. There is not enough data (bit depth) to accurately model the light. The issue could be purely due to digitization limitations or entirely caused by raw rendering problems. It could be the sensor and rendering software just don't work well together. After all, the world-wide usage of the D100 sensor is minuscule by now. It's possible the raw software engineers never bothered to optimize their algorithms for the RD-1.

Image digitization has come a long way since 2002. ISO 800 is only one stop above the system's design maximum.

If the problem was amplified by the raw rendering algorithms. It will be interesting to see if more sophisticated software reduces the posterization. It would be nice if your raw software was ill-suited for the sensor performance because then all you have to do is find more suitable software.

Either way, the cause is using technology that can't handle those challenging conditions.
 
Keith, I´am a RD1s shooter too and the phenomenas like in your photographs are happening to me too. As Ruediger said, it is caused by the poor dynamic range of the sensor. Avoid situations with 2 -3 f-stop difference between avenrage litten areas and highly litten areas. For my stage-shootings (of bands) I do not use the RD1 anymore. I do it with film like HP5 or Neopan1600 in a M-rangefinder. Try to get a little better pics with the EPSON RAW converter or Lightroom, but both can not solve the sensor problem entirely.
George
 
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I have never done any stage shooting at all, but with such high contrast ranges I probably would try to underexpose to get the important light areas right and then push the shadows. I am mainly a b&w film shooter and use the R-D1 to get my hands on color. But I am always surprised what you can find in the shadows of digital files. Once pushed noise increases in these areas, but hey, for me Lightroom does a pretty good job, R-D1 noise looks great anyway and once printed most of it is gone. But as I said, never tried to photograph bands on stages.

Cheers
Ruediger
 
i can't believe that it's the sensor...unless the sensor is damaged in some way. i have never gotten anything remotely looking like that with any of the 3 rd1 bodies that i have used.
 
It's all good ... I understand what's happening now. A combination of the sensor's limited dynamic range combined with the white balance confusion caused by the halogens and topped of by ACDSee's rather dodgy raw file converter that is obviously not optimal for the Epson's output.

Thank **** it's not the camera because that would be a little 'uncool!' :p

I think it may be time to get Lightroom 4 and learn to use it in spite of my preference for the interface of ACDSee Pro. Can anyone offer any suggestions as to where to shop for Lightroom 4 ... remembering I live downunder!
 
I used to get similar results with the earlier raw convertion of Aperture. Aperture2 forward has been great.
So I guess what I'm saying is to confirm as you found.
It's not the camera but rather, the anchient raw processor that caused the problem.
 
There might also be a bit of IR sensitivity going on here. I've found that under regular incandescent lighting, but I don know if halogen may be richer in the particular wavelengths the sensor picks up.
Ari
 
That's definitely a software problem.

Blown highlights are just a part of shooting digital or slide film, but the software is really messing up the highlights even more. Try lightroom 4.

I find the R-D1 underexposes by 2/3 of a stop when set to aperture mode, I have never had a problem with blown highlights but I can understand why it could happen.

Keep in mind the R-D1 is bottom-left centerweighted so if the bottom left half of your frame has lots of dark stuff in it but your brightly highlighted main subject is in the top right of the frame you could get an inaccurate scene reading resulting in photos like the ones you posted.
 
Keith, do you have Epson Raw? It's tiny, and does great b&w... at least until you get Lightroom, which is huge from memory. If you're out in the boonies (like my parents) bandwidth is a joke.

links here
 
ive gotten recommendations to stick with lightroom 3, not to upgrade to 4. Keith, i bet you can pick up a copy for cheap on ebay, even down under lol. And its great
 
astro8 said:
Keith, do you have Epson Raw? It's tiny, and does great b&w... at least until you get Lightroom, which is huge from memory. If you're out in the boonies (like my parents) bandwidth is a joke.

links here
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I've read that Epson Raw is very good but unfortunately I got no software disc with the camera. I've searched the net to try and find a download for it but all the links on various Epson sites are dead or just not listed any more!

Adobe in OZ will mail you the software on a disc but I noticed it costs a fair bit more. There seems to be a couple of legit ebay sellers in OZ that have it for just below adobe's retail and free postage.

I was mucking around with Lightroom 2 this morning ... I could get used to it I guess!
 
astro8 said:
Keith, do you have Epson Raw? It's tiny, and does great b&w... at least until you get Lightroom, which is huge from memory. If you're out in the boonies (like my parents) bandwidth is a joke.

links here
Click to expand...


Ahhh ... I've just noticed you gave a link for the download which I didn't notice.

Thanks. :)
 
Keith said:
I'm using ACDSee Pro and I don't have a jpeg as the camera's set for raw output only. You can see it on the LCD when reviewing though and I gather that's a jpeg generated in the camera.

I think it was the lighting ... these lights they use at QUT are pretty intense and play havock with the white balance on the D700.
Click to expand...

I hope it's not the camera messing up the highlights. To me, it looks like a color profiling issue made even worse by poor processing.

I would use ACR (either Lightroom 3.x or Photoshop CS4 or CS5) with a tone curve set to linear, blacks set to 0 (meaning, unchanged) as well as the highlights. No "highlight recovery", and use AdobeRGB all the way through, converting to sRGB when you save as a JPEG.
 
Keith said:
I... I was mucking around with Lightroom 2 this morning ... I could get used to it I guess!
Click to expand...
Well, I can only speak for myself, but since I started with Lightroom, I never felt the need for any other program to work with my images. But that is just me, not doing stuff like composings, hdr or whatever fancy things you can do to your image data. And there is also a big improvement when going from LR2 to LR4.

Cheers
Ruediger
 
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