Head spinning with all this digital stuff! HELP

[Leicaliker]

Hi

Bought an M8 a couple of weeks ago and love the feel of the camera, the ability to create instantanious images and the fact that I can take an infinate number of shots without paying for film.

I have shot some jpegs and I do like the way they look on screen. There is a luminosity which I remember from my Kodachrome days but without the hassel of setting up a screen (only to watch the images then "pop" out of focus)!

HOWEVER...

I am now moving away from a state of blissful ignorance and wondering if I am missing out on something... should I be shooting RAW... should I be spending late nights in front of my PC processing stuff... do I need to spend money on a printer... but what if the colours are out on my monitor?

In the past when I shot colour it was slides and I got what I got, when I shot black and white I paid for someone to process my negs and I selected my favourites to be enlarged but rarely felt the need for any darkroom tweaks but now a whole world of digtal manipulation is just a click away...

As a starting point:

1. If I use Cap 1 but don't need to change light balance, crop or otherwise manipulate the image will the resulting stored file (jpeg?) be better than the jpeg that has come out of the camera? i.e If I am happy with what I initially see straight from the M8 see will I somehow retrieve additional detail, tonality and so on by processing myself on PC? People say that the in camera processing on the M8 is poor... is this so?

2. What is your opinnion of the in camera black and white conversion programme? My first impressions are really positive and unlike film I can dial in different speeds, contrast levels and so on prior to pressing the shutter... but am I seriously missing out by shooting in this way?

Any steer you can give this long time Leica user but digital newbie would be very much appreciated🙂.

Kind regards




Andrew

 

[Digital Dude]

I see you’re not getting much activity here so I personally recommend you contact Jack Flesher over at GetDPI. He’s pretty much an ace on this sort of thing whereas I’m simply still considered a novice. Aperture-2 seems to work pretty well although I'll know a lot more once I receive my Canon 9500-pro printer.

BTW: I just arbitrarily decided to append my profile to show my age and then I realized my current post-count matched my age ~ too weird.
Regards,😀

 

[Mike Richards]

Shoot RAW for maximum flexibility

Shoot RAW for maximum flexibility

The title says it all. As you learn more about digital processing, you will find the flexibility of processing a raw image to be a distinct advantage. You can change white balance, manipulate exposure, and many other things that would destroy the quality of a jpeg. And you can always re-visit the original for different manipulations. A 2 Gb card in the M8 can store some 150 raw images, and I assume you have a reasonable amount of hard drive space available. So storage space should not be a problem. The M8 does need more time to write the raw (DNG) image, so be careful about shutting off the camera when the red light is blinking. You can take your time to learn all this, but it would be a shame to have only jpegs available in the future if you want some improved or otherwise re-processed images. I picked up a lot of good info from Photoshop User magazine; you may want to try it.

 

[JWW]

It's always a good idea to keep the RAW just like you'd not throw away film negatives. You can set up the M8 for both RAW and jpeg if you'd like. That way you can always go back to the RAW later on.

Jan

 

[Athos6]

You also bring up a good point, to go totally digital you have to get a good monitor and a color calibrator like the LaCie products. Add another level of complexity if you want the picture on the screen to match a printer. I've given up being picky on the whole thing once I found that none of the prints I got back looked like they did on the monitor. Either the color was off or they are a lot darker then they appear on the screen. I'm not willing to spend the extra money for perfect reproductions. I'm a history teacher, not a color space manager!

 

[arnulf]

Shoot RAW!! It takes just a little effort to learn how to post process, and it's totally worth it. Shooting only JPEG is like if you were shooting film, threw away the negs and kept only the prints.

 

[kuzano]

First, understand what JPEG does to the image

First, understand what JPEG does to the image

JPEG, was developed by the Joint Photographers Experts Group, at a time when reduction of file size was a more critical need than image quality.

It is a compression algorithm that compresses files by throwing away data at varying levels. However, at ANY level of compression data is thrown out in the process.

It was developed to reduce file sizes both due to old considerations of file storage space and transferring files over a largely dial-up internet.

In-camera processing, and certainly the date lost to JPEG compression, can not be recovered in any editing program, unless you are using plug-ins to up-res the image. Even then, you are interpolating new data, rather than using the data the camera, and your eye, originally looked at.

Regarding in-camera B&W conversion, why would one walk away from a color scene leaving the color data behind? The conversion in software has so much more control, but only if the original color channels are unmolested by the camera.

RAW... RAW... RAW

Go out and shoot 5,000 RAW images, sell the camera, and beef up your butt muscles for the endless hours in front of the computer.

But truthfully, if you are coming home with JPEGS you've seriously restricted your image capabilities.

And that doesn't take into consideration all the discussion about how poorly the M8 JPEG engine renders JPEGS.

Remember, JPEG is strictly a compression routine. ALL compression is based on finding similar data to throw away.

 

[DaveB]

I regret every digital photo I've taken for which I do not have a RAW original. RAW has saved my butt so many times in terms of exposure and white balance mistakes. It took me a couple years to figure that out.

The video tutorial by Michael Reichman and Jeff Schewe, From Camera to Print, available from the Luminous Landscape website is excellent. It's about 6 hours long, costs $35 USD, and contains a first-rate description of how to establish and maintain a color managed work flow. That sounds expensive, but isn't. It requires probably more of a time than money investment.

Shooting in RAW and a color managed work flow is how you can begin to move from casual snaps to a higher level of control and sophistication in your photography.

 

[bmattock]

I agree that RAW gives maximum flexibility.

I do not agree that RAW is the way to go in every situation. It has real-life disadvantages that might lead you to use JPG in certain circumstances.

Not every photo you take will likely require technical perfection. When I take family photos or event photos, that sort of thing, I find that JPG serves my needs quite well in many circumstances.

If the lighting is good and the camera not confused about white balance, then JPG is often 'good enough'.

Although JPG can have artifacts such as 'jaggies', in general, JPG is quite acceptable in typical DSLR cameras (and I presume the M8 as well).

Shooting JPG is faster than shooting RAW in most cameras, and fills up the buffer less quickly. So if you're shooting fast, JPG can be an advantage.

Every RAW file must be manipulated even if you end up doing very little to it. If a JPG file is acceptable as-is, then you do not have to edit it at all.

So if I'm seeking critical quality, I will shoot RAW. If I am shooting in very iffy lighting situations, I will tend to shoot RAW. If I am shooting once-in-a-lifetime photos that I could never replicate, then yes, RAW.

But I don't find it appropriate for EVERY image I take. I try to balance how much time I'll spend processing each RAW image I take versus the benefit I'm likely to get out of it.

As an example, I recently shot a few hundred images at a St. Patrick's Parade. I'm pleased with the results, but they won't be hanging in galleries anywhere. So RAW would have been overkill, and it would have slowed me down as well. Not to mention the time it would have taken me to process a couple hundred shots of happy drunks wandering around.

If we say shoot RAW because it is ultimate quality - then we should all be shooting LF instead. Ultimate quality. In the real world, there are compromises, and most of them for very good reasons.

 

[Ben Z]

I like to travel and shoot, not sit and process files. I am very willing to give up some "control" to avoid spending time learning and doing digital processing on the computer. I shoot RAW but use DxO and Fred Miranda's sharpening and uprezzing plugins with my 20D. I also shoot DNG on my M8 but I tried Capture One LE and didn't like it, so now I do everything in CS2, including PTCorrect for the CV 12mm, and Noise Ninja where needed. I even shoot my DLux-3 in RAW, then process in CS2 and Noise Ninja. Wherever possible I use the default settings in these plugins, and very rarely find that I want to mess with changing them. I'm sure I could improve my prints incrementally if I delved deeper into post processing but I detest it so much that it's not going to happen.

I just mention this because there are a ton of very "smart" plugins that give very nice results with a minimum of user knowledge and input, so there is no reason to go to either extreme, of accepting whatever the camera spits out or else devoting thousands of hours learning and doing digital processing.

 

[bmattock]

Sounds like a reasonable compromise, Ben.

 

[jaapv]

Imo it is essential to aquire postprocessing skills when shooting digital. In chemical photography the tendency has been to take away all control over the image from the photographer. Where, in the beginning, one had to pour one's own emulsion onto a glass plate and take it from there, it ended in slide film and minlab with uncontrallable results. Only the fewest photographers processed their own colour film (pleading guilty😉)and B&W had been marginalized. Now, with the advent of Photoshop, Lightroom and suchlike full control has been returned to the maker.

Take for instance this shot. Straight Jpeg conversion, equivalent to slide film or routine lab work leads to a less than average result, lready for the bin. The camera jpeg might well have been worse. Of course, it was taken fifteen minutes before sunrise, with grotty light, but it looks nothing like the scene as perceived by the photographer.

Now, through the full use of the facilities of CS3, I was able to recreate the scene as I saw it, since it was hidden in the DNG file, waiting to be brought out:

And this is just one example. Sharpness, local control of image noise, many other aspects to get the optimal image. all of this needs the digital darkroom. Nothing has changed since Ansel Adams: the image is recorded in the camera and created in the darkroom.


And if you are " lazy" as Bill suggests, in the better sense of the word, what is there to stop you opening the image in ACR or LR or C1, hit all the auto buttons and convert. It won't take more than a few seconds per image and leave the option of working the keepers up to real quality. With the added bonus that RAW cconversion in a powerful computer is always better than the product of the limited processing power of the camera.

Just for the record, regarding Benson's "thousands of hours" learning curve. I purchased my copy of CS3 a month ago and spent about twenty hours on the first part of my learning curve.

So what did I do to this image?
I opened the DNG in ACR.
Adjusted the sky in exposure and color, leaving the foregrond a featureless blob.
I converted (in 16 bits )as a smart object to CS3
I copied the smart object and reopened it in ACR
I adjusted the foreground as far as I could, blowing out the sky completely. The color was not quite to my taste and saturating did not get the result I wanted.
I returned to CS3 and the adjusted copylayer.
There I converted to LAB colorspace (without merging the layers), applied the image and chose the "b" channel and soft light, and lowered the opacity to 60% to get just the color I wanted and applied aRGB again.
I created a layer mask, chose a soft brush, set the foreground colour to white and painted in the foreground I wanted into the image.
I flattened the layers and applied a mild sharpening in the luminosity.
The antelopes were a bit soft.
So I made a layer through copy, oversharpened that layer, made a layer mask and painted in the sharpness where needed, then lowered the opacity of that copylayer to get the effect right and flattened again.

Less than ten minutes work and all tricks I had taught myself through selfstudy in those twenty hours...
I could never have done it in a chemical darkroom or never, never, on a Jpeg image.

 

[Ben Z]

Jaap, it would've taken me at least a hundred hours to learn those techniques, only because whenever I try to study image processing it bores me so intensely that I can't stay focused for more than a minute at a time, and forget everything I learned by the next time I sit down to do it (usually months later). I Hated (with a capital "H") wet darkroom work too, which is why I used a custom lab who I could tell him what I wanted and he gave it to me. Sadly, my photofinisher wasn't interested in learning digital either, and retired. Using plugins that automate is only a stopgap until I have re-established a good working relationship with a digital photofinisher, and I'm trying out several that have been recommended to me. I need someone local, so I can show him an uncorrected proof made with my inkjet and tell him what I want , and leave the how to him. IIRC Cartier-Bresson never did any of his own darkroom work either, so I don't suppose there's any shame in it 😉 It isn't like I'm getting my prints from Walmart 😀

 

[Richard Marks]

One thing that took me a while to get round to was profiling my printer. If i had started here I reckon I could have saved hours of time ink and paper. In the UK most of the paper manufacturers offer free profiling for thier own papers (and a minimal charge for any one elses). All you need to do is print a downloadable test chart and post this to them and they will e-mail a bespoke 'profile' to tweek the colour management in your system. This takes an importabt variable out of the equation. You would not belive the difference.

Incidentally I would shoot RAW from the outset and get over the minimal additional hassle. The good thing about M8 images is that they need relatively little post capture processing.
Enjoy your m8.

Richard

 

[F456]

I have spent time agonizing over the problem of enjoying digital photography without having to give up my job to find the time to process files properly (assuming I knew how in the first place!), so I sympathize.

Your practice could be influenced by how many shots you take and how you want to view them. I'm going to offer heresy here, but I don't see the point of keeping every image you take. Many will disagree for good reason, but I do a thorough edit of all my files and delete the ones that first AND second impressions say are not up to scratch, are not likely to be viewed again, etc. This way you keep your pictures more manageable. Beware of being trigger happy with the delete buttons though!

Next thing: find software that you are happy using. All the programs seem to include a lot more than you are likely to use (i.e. the opposite to the Leica idea of concentration on essentials). The interface can be appealing or off-putting to different people. For instance I like Capture One Pro but others swear by ACR. I like Photoshop but not Nikon Capture (though I do use Nikons quite a lot)...

Decide how you want to view your shots. If you are not likely to do much printing, or are happy to give most of your printing to local minilabs, don't worry so much about colour management. Even if your screen is right (and with a Mac, if you use Apple computers, you can correct the screen in moments using the inbuilt software in the operating system, Mac OS X, so you don't need calibration equipment) others who view your shots will probably have screens that are off anyway. You can stick to sRGB profile and not worry about colour management unless you want to do your own prints and worry about the colour restrictions imposed by this basic colour space.

Personally I'd recommend RAW if you keep your shooting quantity within manageable limits. One thing that is indispensable is to learn how to interpret the histogram on your M8 (and/or computer) screen. Basically avoid letting the mountain or its foothills move past the right hand side of the screen, to avoid featureless areas of tone such as plain undetailed white or red. In RAW you can adjust this effectively up to about a stop; beyond that you may decide as with a bad slide that the image isn't up to it and should be trashed. Of course certain reflections can be allowed to burn out; if you literally don't allow anything past the right hand side of the histogram screen most of the subject in a reflection filled shot will go too dark.

Sit down with an old-fashioned note book and a good pen and spend some time deciding how you want to organize your files and how you want to back-up. E.g. even if you want to stick with JPEGs, you should probably keep an unedited copy of each shot so that if you mess up in adjusting files you know you can create another working copy from the untouched master file. For quick results you can do what you alluded to: shoot raw; batch process the files to JPEG; print and move on. You have your raw files to return to for a special shot to be reworked.

Finally, a piece of advice I read somewhere: be content with second best. Otherwise I'd still be agonizing over pictures instead of going out and enjoying being part of nature, a social event, or whatever else being a photographer gives you access to. And of course my advice is subjective; ignore some, most, or all of it!

Good luck; the M8 is much more fun to use than the SLRs in my opinion, and despite all I enjoy it more than my film cameras that I am keeping. Tom

 

[rsl]

Jaap, it would've taken me at least a hundred hours to learn those techniques, only because whenever I try to study image processing it bores me so intensely that I can't stay focused for more than a minute at a time, and forget everything I learned by the next time I sit down to do it (usually months later). I Hated (with a capital "H") wet darkroom work too, which is why I used a custom lab who I could tell him what I wanted and he gave it to me. Sadly, my photofinisher wasn't interested in learning digital either, and retired. Using plugins that automate is only a stopgap until I have re-established a good working relationship with a digital photofinisher, and I'm trying out several that have been recommended to me. I need someone local, so I can show him an uncorrected proof made with my inkjet and tell him what I want , and leave the how to him. IIRC Cartier-Bresson never did any of his own darkroom work either, so I don't suppose there's any shame in it 😉 It isn't like I'm getting my prints from Walmart 😀

Ben, The problem is that the guy you hire to do your processing doesn't know what you saw, and no amount of description is going to tell him. Actually Cartier-Bresson did darkroom work in the very beginning but soon gave it up. On the other hand he was shooting monochrome, which doesn't require the same range of adjustments you need with color, and he settled on one guy who did all his processing through most of his career, to a very specific set of instructions.

The hairy-sounding list of steps Jaap gave above relate to what I'd call a problem negative. If you're careful and don't try too many high-wire head stands like that one, most postprocessing boils down to a rare and usually minor color adjustment with the middle gray dropper in ACR followed by a quick blast of sharpening with Smart Sharpen. It's not really rocket science.

Oh, by the way, looks as if Jaap also cropped his picture, which was an emphatic no no with Cartier-Bresson.

 

[Keith]

Like Ben I'm not a photoshop person and don't have the patience for learning how to use it. I do however have a fairly simple routine that gives me a level of consistency that I'm happy with. I use Capture One to adjust white balance and apply a little sharpening ... then convert the DNG's to TIFFS and work on them in ACDSee Pro which is a very easy program to use and while it may not posess the sophistication of photoshop etc, it does what I want it to do simply, in a way that I can follow.

Finally I convert to JPEG.

 

[mfunnell]

It's always a good idea to keep the RAW just like you'd not throw away film negatives. You can set up the M8 for both RAW and jpeg if you'd like. That way you can always go back to the RAW later on.

Jan

While I don't use an M8, I do capture both RAW and JPEG when shooting digital. If I'm going through volumes of files and just printing 6x4s I find that using the JPEGs and some basic automatic adjustments is usually sufficient to do a "good enough" job and takes little time. I process from RAW only for "problem" shots that are otherwise worth saving, or when I want a larger / better print. And I curse myself for those shots I took early in the game where I have no RAW file to go back to!

So I'd strongly recommend capturing both. Even if you don't use the RAWs now, I think you will later. SD cards are cheap, so don't risk wanting to beat on the "earlier you" in 12 months time.

...Mike

 

[rsl]

Yes, jpegs are okay for shots that are "good enough," if you're satisfied with "good enough."

 

[bmattock]

Yes, jpegs are okay for shots that are "good enough," if you're satisfied with "good enough."

You make it sound like a bad thing.

The truth is, quality is measured on a steeply-sloping curve.

The first 50% of quality is easy to obtain.

The next 10% is slightly harder, the following 10% harder still, until we get up around 90% of 'high quality'. From there on, the curve is very steep. You trade increasing amounts of time (and money for high-end kit) for decreasing amounts of improvement. Yes, 95% is better than 90%. But it nearly twice as hard to reach.

And in the real world, 90% of 'high quality' is quite enough for most of us.

This is true for many things. My car is 90% as good as the top of the line 4WD SUV, but at 1/8 of the cost. To get that last 10% is a price I am not willing to pay. My suit is 90% as good as a bespoke Super-110 wool suit, but it is 1/10 the price. That's quite acceptable to me. How many of us insist on the absolute best of everything? How many of us can afford to - in money or time, let alone effort?

I consider it the most efficient use of my time to aim for 90%, unless I am specifically intending to go all out to produce the highest possible quality and the situation calls for it.

Would you labor for hours on every image from a family picnic? I would not. Do I want 'good enough' shots? Yes, that's quite sufficient for those circumstances.