I really like the last two Ray. Some of these still appear quite soft. Is this soft look by design? Are you sharpening them any and if so, how? Please don’t take this as criticism as I am just continually trying to learn different techniques that other photographers use. I realize sharpness is sometimes overrated and I am guilty of over sharpening some of my photos.
—
Have A Nice Day, 🙂
James Hutchinson
http://www.pbase.com/myeyesview http://www.myeyesviewstudio.com/ "Ray" wrote in message
I finally had some time yesterday to play with my new macro lens.
Those
pictures aren’t perfect, but I believe they’re better than last time.
http://www.pbase.com/image/31441517
Then click on next four times (there are 5 pictures).
Warning for dial-up users : Pictures are 180Kb each.
Ray, which lens did you purchase? You probably said, but I forget. Also, in dealing with bright red flowers, have you seen any evidence of blowing out the red channel as discussed on this forum a few weeks ago?
Chuck
Ray
Great images … great improvement!
Grant
P.S. Now you notice I didn’t mention anything about THE camera you were using. 🙂
First, I’m not offended (otherwise, I would not have posted any link here!!)
I’ve resized them, then sharpen a bit, that’s all. They were shot in RAW, and processed with Capture One SE (for Mac). The sharpening setting : Amount between 70-85% (usually 75%)
Radius : between 0,7 and 1,0 (usually 0,8) pixels
Threshold : 0 or 1, usually 0.
I have an LCD monitor, everything looks sharper, that might explain why I see them just the way I think they should look. Perhaps I should boot my friend’s PC to view them his CRT monitor… ?
Ray
Ray, which lens did you purchase? You probably said, but I forget. Also, in dealing with bright red flowers, have you seen any evidence of blowing out the red channel as discussed on this forum a few weeks ago?
Chuck
POSITIVELY, DEFINITIVELY, ABSOLUTELY YES… !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(did I mention I had problems balancing colours because of the overblown red channel ? Hehe!)
I also have another problem with this colour : (RGB values)
Colour shot :
62-12-78 (this is more or less what my flowers look like in the real world).
Colour on the screen:
178-38-73 (again, more or less)
This is the only I’m having problems with. Green is right on, blue, yellow, orange, pink, brown, name them, they’re all ok. Except this one (I can’t name it… I’d say mauve.. ?)
Ray
Ray
Great images … great improvement!
Grant
P.S. Now you notice I didn’t mention anything about THE camera you were using. 🙂
Hahaha ! I’ve been teasing you lately but to be honnest, I do believe Nikon is manufacturing great camera and lenses. If I would to start from scratch today, I’d consider their cameras very seriously.
Ray
P.S. Thanks 😉
Ray
Concerning your red problem that you and chuck were talking about. I had the same problem with my Canon although it was a different camera. I suspected it was caused by the white balance algorithm Canon was using and whenever I had to photograph a subject that had lots of red in it I either turned off auto colour balance or used a white card and defined colour balance. Once I started doing that my problems when way. Might not work for you or you may have already tried it but if not it is worth a go.
Grant
Grant,
What’s a white card? Is it like a neutral grey card? (I just bought one, last week, but didn’t got a single moment to play with it).
Also, I realized I hadn’t uploaded the EXIF data, so I updated my pictures.
Ray
Grant, thanks for the tip. Perhaps that’s why Susan reports that the RAW image doesn’t show so much propensity to red blowout as a JPEG. Certainly worth experimenting, considering the camera does have the ability to store a custom white balance.
Chuck
Chuck,
Stupid me… Forgot to answer both questions… The lens is a Sigma 50mm 1:2.8 Macro EX.
Ray
Reds and purples are two of the reasons I shoot everything in RAW.
—
Have A Nice Day, 🙂
James Hutchinson
http://www.pbase.com/myeyesview http://www.myeyesviewstudio.com/ wrote in message
Grant, thanks for the tip. Perhaps that’s why Susan reports that the
RAW
image doesn’t show so much propensity to red blowout as a JPEG.
Certainly
worth experimenting, considering the camera does have the ability to
store a
custom white balance.
Chuck
A white card is the other side of your Kodak grey card. 😉
Leen
I am using Capture One LE now and I have found that I like Adobe’s sharpening algorithms better than C1. I use C1 for white balance, exposure comp, tone, color cast and sometimes saturation adjustments with the sharpening turned off.
—
Have A Nice Day, 🙂
James Hutchinson
http://www.pbase.com/myeyesview http://www.myeyesviewstudio.com/ "Ray" wrote in message
First, I’m not offended (otherwise, I would not have posted any link
here!!)
I’ve resized them, then sharpen a bit, that’s all. They were shot in
RAW,
and processed with Capture One SE (for Mac). The sharpening setting : Amount between 70-85% (usually 75%)
Radius : between 0,7 and 1,0 (usually 0,8) pixels
Threshold : 0 or 1, usually 0.
I have an LCD monitor, everything looks sharper, that might explain
why I
see them just the way I think they should look. Perhaps I should boot
my
friend’s PC to view them his CRT monitor… ?
Ray
I had read a post in another forum from someone who went to his local paint store and got sample cards of many shades of white through grays. They were free and attached in a way that you could flip out the one needed for any particular situation. It sounded like a good idea. He did many test shots and had put notes on the back of each one as to what he might expect from using it as his CWB.
—
Have A Nice Day, 🙂
James Hutchinson
http://www.pbase.com/myeyesview http://www.myeyesviewstudio.com/ wrote in message
A white card is the other side of your Kodak grey card. 😉
Leen
Leen
Thanks you for that one.
Now here is a trick go to Home Depot and get those paint chips that are about 2" x 2". Get a whole bunch of them, not just white one, but all different colours and you can use your colour balance to create some really funky tricks.
Grant
Ray,
Nice shots. I read all of the posts to this thread with interest since I generally have the "blow out" problem with deep purples and reds. I’ll try Grant’s white card idea.
Were these shots late in the day? They seem, at least to me, to be slightly dark for what I think are daylight images.
Dick
Thanks, Ray. I thought that you had settled on the Sigma.
Ray, if this really is your garden, I didnot know you grew your own canabis!
Leen
Leen :
1st post – very funny.. Never mind abou the real answer, I’ve since figured it out.
2nd post – not, it’s not canabis. I live about 20 meters from a police station (they’re in my backyard). And they pass by my "garden" quite often, and would this have been drug, I’d have known it a looooong time ago.
Ray
Dick,
It was between 14h30 and 15h00. Sometimes there was sun, some other the sun was blocked (
http://www.pbase.com/image/31442593). It wasn’t a big sunshine day.
Generally, I don’t like too bright pictures, so perhaps I went on a little too hard on the under exposure settings…
Ray
Nice shots, Ray. On MY monitor, they look a tad dark and perhaps could use a touch more sharpening. But this whole topic reinforces the problem of viewing on-line. I have never calibrated my monitor because (by sheer luck) what I see on screen is VERY close to what I get in prints when I send the files to Future Shop with a ‘no correction’ tag. But a film photographer friend of mine has always complained that he thought my pictures were too dark and lacked shadow detail. I finally went to his house last week and was shocked at what my pictures looked like on his monitor. Rat-poop on a stick would be more appealing.
In truth, I thought all Internet photos looked crappy on his monitor, not just mine, but his text (95% of his work is MS Word) looked OK. I tried my best to adjust his monitor better, but could never get it to look even close to what I felt was good. I wasn’t able to reduce the contrast (which was very, very high) without having the brightness drop way down as well. I didn’t have time to look for driver updates (his system was Win98/ATI card) so I left the job half done.
Today I looked at my pictures on a brand new TFT LCD screen at a store. They were lighter and showed a bit more shadow detail than I see at home. Had I been looking at this monitor all along, I bet I would have been trying to calibrate between it and the lab printer.
Anyway, I just wanted to remind everyone that, on-line, what you see ain’t necessarily what’s there!
I found no THC in the garden posts.
—
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Dave Hamer
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (
http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.721 / Virus Database: 477 – Release Date: 7/16/2004
Hi Ray, Wonderful pictures! Love how the flowers are in total focus and the background fades and blurs. They look like paintings.
I have no clue about the technical stuff, just know they are beautiful. Jane
Patti,
Can you (or someone else) point me to what is now referred as Castor Bean (what Leen thought was canabis before)? If you’re talking about the little flowers (two last pictures), they are plants we had last year and that, miraculously reappeared in a open spot in the concrete surrounding our apartment, outside. We have no clue how they propagated so far…
Ray
Yes, those are Castor Beans. I brought a bunch of the seeds back from Costa Rica several years ago, and had them growing all thru our garden the next summer. Then my brother told me that they were poisonous so I pulled them all up. I have only 4 left in pots where my grandkids can’t get to them.
Castor Beans don’t smell, but Cannabis does, the cops can smell a mature female plant a mile away. Jane
Edit, this is Ray’s castor bean,
<
http://www.pbase.com/image/30740824>
J
Today I looked at my pictures on a brand new TFT LCD screen at a store. They were lighter and showed a bit more shadow detail than I see at home. Had I been looking at this monitor all along, I bet I would have been trying to calibrate between it and the lab printer.
I think you have a very, very good point here. I use an LCD at home. Evertyhing is sharper (lesser need for sharpening), and displays more shadows than my friend’s PC (it’s a Mac vs PC thing, he’s using an uncalibrated CRT).
Every time I look at my pictures on his screen, they look very dark. But, I’ve always believed the problem was his, because everything is just so dark on his screen.
Ray
Hi Ray, Don’t pull them up, you can leave them in your garden. I destroyed mine because my oldest grandson was at the ‘put everything in your mouth’ stage.
We had them in our yard when we were youngsters in Florida, its only babies who might mess with them.
In tropical zones, they will grow into a strange tree. We used to gather the seeds when we were young.
They are quite pretty, I have some pictures of mine when they were quite tall a couple of years ago. They are on my other computer, found them,
<
http://www.pbase.com/fatyellowlab/extra_stuff>
This is about how big they will grow around here.
Jane
This canabis reminded me of a nice story. One of my customers was born and raised in Kosovo in former Yugoslavia. He and his brother own a one hour photo store in a small town. He goes there twice a year, usually in summer and at the end of the year.
Several years ago, at the military intervention, the shop was in the US sector. When he went there for Christmas, he thought it might be a nice idea to buy an American flag to hang outside the store to try to attract US military customers. Just only a few hours before leaving he bought one in a rush, but forgot all about it. When packing to travel home again to Holland he found the flag and handed it to his brother.
Back home, few days later, he received a call from his brother. Some one from the US army had come to the shop and wanted him to remove the flag as they didnot appreciate the abuse of their flag.
It took real Americans to notice this flag showed canabis leaves instead of stars. Wrong store to buy it. 😉
Leen
its only babies who might mess with them.
And animals. I lost a pet rabbit that way when I was a child.
