boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
You are lucky to have a camera with a shutter fast enough to catch that action. Is it a special camera? It must be some super fast high speed camera. Sheesh!
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RAW vs JPG
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You are lucky to have a camera with a shutter fast enough to catch that action. Is it a special camera? It must be some super fast high speed camera. Sheesh!
L1005046_100crop by fiftyonepointsix, on FlickrIf do not see any difference between these two crops of a DNG file, then it will not matter to you.
G5046_100crop by fiftyonepointsix, on Flickr
L1005046 by fiftyonepointsix, on Flickr
Godfrey
somewhat colored
That's true for me too when using film. I haven't shot any color film, aside from instant print, in more than 25 years.
G
boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
If do not see any difference between these two crops of a DNG file, then it will not matter to you.
I cannot see any difference, so shoot me. I just do not get into the small differences. Maybe I should. Perhaps I will grow into it. In the meantime I will just be glad that the camera engineers have made JPG's appear as good as they do. I read that JPG's themselves have improved and I'll bet a mortgage payment that the code to process RAW to JPG has gotten better. This means that "then" and "now" are different. Cameras are better, the software is better.
That's why I posted the example.
wlewisiii
Just another hotel clerk
I can, but for me it is subtle, mostly down by the fence. Unlike when I started using the DCP file with my M 240 raw files. Hoo boy, now that was a game changer in ART!
Coldkennels
Barnack-toting Brit.
To be honest, all this (and the responses to it) really tell me is that not everyone's screen is set up the same way.
I can quite clearly see how much more blocked up the shadows are in the first one... but it turns out my Macbook is displaying more detail in the shadows than most computers. For a long time I was adjusting the black point to where it looked good on this screen only to realise the shadows looked completely bloody crushed to everyone else. I can't remember what the issue was - the default gamma settings, maybe? - but.... yeah. Add this to the list of reasons I absolutely hate digital photography.
JoeV
Thin Air, Bright Sun
I like darkroom prints too, but it’s difficult to see those prints, absent visiting a physical gallery, without employing the imperfect medium of internet-connected screens, few of which are calibrated to the same standard. Hence the problem isn’t “digital photography” per se, but the medium through which we communicate. It is possible to take a very traditional approach to digital media and, in the privacy of one’s studio, create paper prints, but the sharing of them with a wider audience is where the devil is in the details. 😉
Dogman
Veteran
Okay. Since we're comparing stuff from JPEGs, here's a shot I did in 2022 on voting day. I was not attempting to produce great art--I'm not sure I even know what that is--I was just snapping a few record shots. It was lousy light and a pretty poor picture.
Original JPEG SOOC resized for web:
That would be a nice shot if I wanted to take a picture of some unknown guy in a green "Ireland" t-shirt or cars in a parking lot. But, fact was, I wanted a quick snap of my wife who was hiding in the shadows. I also wasn't interested in doing the picture in color. I sometimes shoot color JPEGs just to fiddle with the color channels in Lightroom but mostly I shoot B&W JPEG when I want a B&W photo.
So I played with the SOOC image and came up with this:
An embarrassingly bad picture, huh? Yeah, I know. Rotten light, crappy exposure. Bad expression on my wife's face and nothing interesting happening. One of those shots that end up in the "Delete" file on the first pass. But I kept it to remind myself of the potential in JPEG files. Since I'm just a muddler, doodler, fiddler and fun-time snapper, what's not to like with JPEGs? Let the camera do the work* of processing the files to a rough draft state and I'll finish it with software at home.
*The quote "Let the camera do the work...I'll do the thinking" was from Helmut Newton in a video clip of him in the studio. He said the camera was set on "all automatic".
.....................................................
Original JPEG SOOC resized for web:
That would be a nice shot if I wanted to take a picture of some unknown guy in a green "Ireland" t-shirt or cars in a parking lot. But, fact was, I wanted a quick snap of my wife who was hiding in the shadows. I also wasn't interested in doing the picture in color. I sometimes shoot color JPEGs just to fiddle with the color channels in Lightroom but mostly I shoot B&W JPEG when I want a B&W photo.
So I played with the SOOC image and came up with this:
An embarrassingly bad picture, huh? Yeah, I know. Rotten light, crappy exposure. Bad expression on my wife's face and nothing interesting happening. One of those shots that end up in the "Delete" file on the first pass. But I kept it to remind myself of the potential in JPEG files. Since I'm just a muddler, doodler, fiddler and fun-time snapper, what's not to like with JPEGs? Let the camera do the work* of processing the files to a rough draft state and I'll finish it with software at home.
*The quote "Let the camera do the work...I'll do the thinking" was from Helmut Newton in a video clip of him in the studio. He said the camera was set on "all automatic".
.....................................................
Godfrey
somewhat colored
You must hate looking at prints too, since prints look different in every different kind of light you bounce off them. ??? Sheesh.
A JPEG, any JPEG, represents a lossy process of discarding 85-90% of the data that the sensor captured. The goal is to keep the 10-15% of the data that is significant to make a pleasing photograph. Do you want to trust a simple machine (camera) and the settings made by a team of engineers somewhere to know what for every case is the *right* 10-15% to keep?
All those "I prefer film" folks who talk about nuances of their processing setup to get just those fine little points of distinction in the negatives that they can express/render into their hand-made darkroom wet lab prints ... and you want to switch a digital camera to its most automatic mode in the end to end process and trust other people (whom you do not even know) to have made all those decisions correctly for you.
Hmm.
G
boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
OTOH how much better are you than trained engineers and color science guys at figuring out what is going on? I get some really nice JPG's and do not flatter myself enough that I can make much of an improvement, if any. The folks who write the software to take a raw file to JPG are in the guts of the camera where all the fun stuff happens. They know and see things we do not. It is the difference between using an editor and writing the code for one. That stuff going on "under the sheets" can get pretty sophisticated. Well, actually it is pretty sophisticated and very complex. Just look at some of the code Brian has written in FORTRAN to make raw file conversions. Whether or not you believe it the cameras today, and some older ones, do a great job on the raw > JPG conversions. To wit:
B0000575 by West Phalia, on Flickr
B0000598 by West Phalia, on Flickr
B0000029 by West Phalia, on Flickr
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Retro-Grouch
Veteran
I'm currently doing all my shooting on color transparency film (which means, realistically, E100 since Fuji is a no-show). This means that all of my decisions have been made for me by Kodak. Am I sometimes frustrated by the limitations of that film? You betcha! But I choose to work within the parameters available to me, and adjust my "seeing" to fit those parameters. When I shot digital, I operated under the same philosophy, and shot SOOC monochrome JPEGs. I imagine that many JPEG-only photographers are operating in a similar fashion. And incidentally, everything I've ever posted here is a SOOC JPEG.
All tools have limitations, and some more than others. But sometimes near-infinite choice is a burden and source of creative paralysis. For me. As always, YMMV.
Godfrey
somewhat colored
As a photographer, I flatter myself by saying that only I know what I want to the best degree possible. No committee room full of "trained engineers and color science guys" can possibly know what I want to see in all circumstances.
Having worked in companies that developed imaging systems of various types, I'd say those guys know massive amounts more than I do about how to make the hardware they're building and the software they're writing do what they want it to do, but it's people like me that they came to to ask whether or not what they thought worked well actually did. That's a lot of what I used to do with some of those guys ... look at what they'd created and evaluate it for them, tell them whether or not I thought it was great or needed a bit of a tweak. Because I am a photographer, and they are engineers. I did this kind of thing for NASA as well. 😉
(My job position was often labeled engineer of one kind or another, but in all honesty I'm a Mathematician and a Photographer first, and only an Engineer by job title. My interview for NASA was short and sweet:
He took the temporary label off three weeks later; I stayed for four years. 😉 )
Being a Photographer simply implies a different skill set compared to being an Engineer or a Color Science Guy.
G
DownUnder
awol (temporarily I hope)
Interesting, this post.
Like the poster, I also have noticed the different effect/s of converting color photographs to B&W. Something unusual and even unique can happen to them. Tones change. Shadows lighten. Some parts of the image take on an almost ethereal glow. In the 1960s when I first took up photography, we did everything in B&W, excepting now and then a wedding when the bride wanted color and was prepared to pay extra for it. The GODs of Kodacolor II. Gone now. Not missed, certainly by me. Most of my negatives from that era have largely faded, but then I can safely argue that very few of them were worth keeping anyway. When I did color work, something in my brain seemed to shut down and I became even more reluctant to stretch my meager talents and click away recklessly than I usually did with (the much cheaper) B&W.
Anyway, this particular post is relevant to me in many ways. During the Covid lockdown in Australia, I scanned several hundred folders of long-neglected 35mm and 120 negatives and slides. Going back into my scan folders now, I realize what a p*ss-poor job I did of much of it. Not sure why. The most annoying issue is with mid-tones, then sharpness. The latter I can easily fix, the former not so much, other than to return to the originals and re-scan. At this time my initial response to that is, enough is enough, no thanks!!
But I've been playing with the color images and converting them to B&W. Surprisingly, many of even the worst scans I did are savable. Not that they will ever hang in a gallery as exhibition prints, but I'm now sending many old images taken of my grandparents, uncles and aunts in the period 1961-1965, to surviving family members (the original subjects have long ago passed away). And they are grateful to have them.
Which is good enough for me. Being me as I am, I have to constantly remind myself that the perfect is the mortal enemy of the good enough.
DownUnder
awol (temporarily I hope)
OTOH how much better are you than trained engineers and color science guys at figuring out what is going on? I get some really nice JPG's and do not flatter myself enough that I can make much of an improvement, if any. The folks who write the software to take a raw file to JPG are in the guts of the camera where all the fun stuff happens. They know and see things we do not. It is the difference between using an editor and writing the code for one. That stuff going on "under the sheets" can get pretty sophisticated. Well, actually it is pretty sophisticated and very complex. Just look at some of the code Brian has written in FORTRAN to make raw file conversions. Whether or not you believe it the cameras today, and some older ones, do a great job on the raw > JPG conversions. To wit:
Of course YMMV.
Speaking only for myself here, I have no need to figure out what is going on. More important to me is to figure out what to do with what I have. Most of us surely work on this basis. The end result is, well, what we want.
Your points noted, though. And appreciated. Food for thought, sort of thing. Contradictions enrich the mind!!
boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
My take is that the output of the camera is good, very good. I am not interested in obsessing over perhaps tweaking a shade. The camera knows what it saw better than I.
In HS I had a job in the lab of a dye factory. I came in after school, scrubbed and cleaned out beakers used in the hot water bath testing dyes, then I would weigh out dyes for testing multi fabric swatches. Later Mo, a retired chemist, came in full time and I was his lab boy/flunky. Between Bay, the plant boss, Mo and another chemist they managed to crank out the colors they wanted without enlisting the aid of one single weaver. I guess the chemists knew what they were doing. But that is just a guess.
I used to be very active on audio boards when I was doing a lot of recording. I've told this before but it bears retelling. A fellow on the board swore he could easily tell WAV, uncompressed files, from MP3, compressed files. This other fellow sent the "golden ears" a CD of eight tracks that "golden ears" had to differentiate. And so he did, quite confidently. When the fellow who submitted the tracks told "golden ears" that all the files were MP3 files "golden ears" never spoke to him again. Software is quite good. If the RAW > JPG conversions were not good we would all be working from RAW files but we are not.
I am just as content to allow the camera to handle the conversions as I am to let the camera do the capture.
I posted this recently on the board. It's a no big deal pic. But it does show a bunch of color and texture from an old Leica, an M240, with the CV 40mm f/1.4 ASPH Nokton. I like how they work together. This was shot at f/5.6 IIRC.
M2419899 M240 + CV 40mm f/1.2 ASPH Nokton by West Phalia, on FlickrCMur12
Veteran
I find this kind of thread interesting because of my utter ignorance of post processing, though I still hope to learn it. Most of what is posted here I have heard before, but there are some bits here and there that are new to me, so thanks for those.
I've heard JPGs compared to slides, but I disagree with that because the slide holds all the data, with no compression.
A couple of parallels I see to JPGs are the following:
1. Evaluative Metering. The camera analyzes the light for the photographer and converts it into camera settings, similarly to the camera analyzing RAW files and interpreting/converting them into JPGs.
2. Color Prints done by a Commercial Lab. The photographer sends a roll of color print film to the lab, where the negatives are developed in a standard process, then interpreted/converted into prints by an automatic printer. In a professional lab, the negatives may be interpreted/converted into prints by a human technician, but the photographer is still trusting someone else to do that interpreting for her/him.
- Murray
I've heard JPGs compared to slides, but I disagree with that because the slide holds all the data, with no compression.
A couple of parallels I see to JPGs are the following:
1. Evaluative Metering. The camera analyzes the light for the photographer and converts it into camera settings, similarly to the camera analyzing RAW files and interpreting/converting them into JPGs.
2. Color Prints done by a Commercial Lab. The photographer sends a roll of color print film to the lab, where the negatives are developed in a standard process, then interpreted/converted into prints by an automatic printer. In a professional lab, the negatives may be interpreted/converted into prints by a human technician, but the photographer is still trusting someone else to do that interpreting for her/him.
- Murray
Godfrey
somewhat colored
Having worked in a commercial photofinishing lab for a couple of years, there isn't any such thing as a fully automatic printer. A human operator, even in an automatic printer situation, has to do tweaks on a frame by frame basis to make decent looking prints.
This is very very different from trusting the simple brain of a low powered device like a camera to know "the right thing to do" in all cases. Which is why camera manufacturers include a lot of rendering adjustments in the cameras to tweak the JPEG settings and obtain pleasing photos, and some allow you to capture in raw format and render the images into JPEGs in a couple of different ways (I know Olympus traditionally had this facility, don't know if they or others still do).
As I said before, I use only raw capture and it simplifies my shooting workflow, I make all the rendering decisions when I run my photos through Lightroom or whatever other image processing apps I might be working with. What you choose to do is up to you, and I don't care what that might be... All I care about is that posted photos are rendered nicely and look good. 🙂
G
Kat - Santa Clara 2023
Leica M10 Monochrom + Summicron-M 50mm f/2, Green filter
DownUnder
awol (temporarily I hope)
Congratulations to you, Mr Dog (or Mr Man, rather both, ha!). You did a marvelous job on this image. In fact, nothing short of miraculous, given the depths of those shadows when you started out.
I now have hope for some of my more, well, shadowy so-called rejected shots. And something new to do to help pass the time.
As for what you have achieved or accomplished, the person you had to please with it was your spouse. I hope she liked it.
Please feel free to tell her at least one reader of RFF liked it too...
Dogman
Veteran
I have two basic procedures.
When shooting, I set the camera to aperture priority auto exposure and I ride the exposure compensation dial.
When processing the files in Lightroom, I fiddle around until things look right to me.
I used to use those pistol-looking 1 degree spot meters, incident and reflected light meters and placed grey values accordingly while I agonized over exposure. Matrix metering in cameras changed all that. When I first started printing digital files--in my color days--I downloaded each paper's unique signature profile information for my printer to get the colors correct. Then I read that the printer can set all that for you if you allow it. So I let it. Better color than I ever got before (but my color sense sucks...that's why I shoot black and white). I used to buy automobiles with manual transmissions until....
These machines keep getting better. That's why AI is so scary. Or maybe not, depends on your viewpoint.
Will the day come when machines are better at love-making? Would that help with population control? Or would it lead to population eradication? Soothsaying is such a bitch.🙄
When shooting, I set the camera to aperture priority auto exposure and I ride the exposure compensation dial.
When processing the files in Lightroom, I fiddle around until things look right to me.
I used to use those pistol-looking 1 degree spot meters, incident and reflected light meters and placed grey values accordingly while I agonized over exposure. Matrix metering in cameras changed all that. When I first started printing digital files--in my color days--I downloaded each paper's unique signature profile information for my printer to get the colors correct. Then I read that the printer can set all that for you if you allow it. So I let it. Better color than I ever got before (but my color sense sucks...that's why I shoot black and white). I used to buy automobiles with manual transmissions until....
These machines keep getting better. That's why AI is so scary. Or maybe not, depends on your viewpoint.
Will the day come when machines are better at love-making? Would that help with population control? Or would it lead to population eradication? Soothsaying is such a bitch.🙄