Author Topic: New Camera - New Pics (Read 782 times)

Brenjen · « **Reply #30 on:** May 26, 2006, 10:09:44 AM »

LOL, ok if you can navigate photoshop, gimp shouldn't be a problem. But oh well, you know about gimp, you know it's free so I'll leave it at that. I am surprised that your D-50 puts out crappy images, our D-50- is on par with the Canon DSLR's in the same price range.

eagl · « **Reply #31 on:** May 26, 2006, 10:29:52 AM »

It's not that the images were really "crappy" exactly, but with the default camera settings and the output image set to highest quality jpeg, the images were no better than my 4 mp dimageXT which has notoriously mediocre performance for a compact point and click. The D50 really shines when I shoot in RAW though, because then all the image data is there and I can make it look really nice with just a few minutes of manipulation.

The big example is the huge amount of brown haze here in south korea. It's like LA smog most of the time, and it makes shooting outdoors fairly challenging. Colors just get this brownish hazy cast and everything looks muted. It's like shooting through a dirty window all the time, and that's what the auto settings with jpg output looked like. Worse, the camera's automatic adjustments to compensate made the colors look really off and added artifacts I could see.

I also had trouble shooting really basic scenes inside my dorm room. Contrast was all over the place, shadows jumping out, blooming, totally whacked color balance, etc. But simply shooting in RAW and then telling the software to apply an "auto" white balance adjustment resulted in much much higher quality images. Plus when working with raw images it's easier to adjust sharpness filters and other settings.

When I saw that, I ditched jpg output entirely and now I only shoot in RAW+jpg (raw image plus low quality jpg for each shot) because that lets me do the max image manipulation, plus I get to compare it to the camera's jpg output to see if I'm deviating too far from how the camera thought it ought to look. I must say that so far, I have beaten the camera's default processing every single time after less than 5 min fiddling with the settings, even when using nikon view which only has very basic processing filters.

eagl · « **Reply #32 on:** May 26, 2006, 10:36:47 AM »

I'm a firm believer that today's point and click cameras are "good enough" for 99% of the people out there. If you're not going to really dig into the DSLR settings and do a little post processing on the computer, you might as well save some money and time and get one of those little cameras. There just isn't much of a quality diff at "auto" settings, and I've found that even in extreme situations like fast action or low light, the little compacts are pretty well tweaked to produce nice images regardless of the conditions or situation. Even an entry-level DSLR like the D50 can get blown away at "auto" settings by a little compact.

I saw an 8mp 6x optical zoom compact for under $300 on woot.com today... Under most normal conditions, that little piece of junk probably takes better pics than my D50 (on auto settings) because it's designed to give great results for people who know nothing about photography in a wide range of conditions. The DSLRs just don't have that level of automatic processing, so to get good pics you really need to shoot raw and post-process.

IMHO.

eagl · « **Reply #33 on:** May 26, 2006, 10:47:18 AM »

Examples - The first picture is what the camera thinks the world ought to look like. The second picture is what it looked like after I spent a few minutes processing the raw file. The real world looked a lot more like the second pic and although I know the greens are a touch overbright, the rest of the image really does match the real world a lot better.

I'm not any good at this yet, but I'm already better than the camera's auto mode output.

Brenjen · « **Reply #34 on:** May 26, 2006, 11:16:17 AM »

Maybe you have a faulty camera. Our cameras auto-settings look good. I would post some pics, but the website my wife has her pictures posted on has copyright protection & none of her pictures are on my PC...I don't let her mess with my PC, she has her own.

If I had to doctor pics to get them to look right I wouldn't like it either, but fortunately our camera works perfectly. The auto-settings on our D-50 smoke the best pictures my dads Kodak was able to do with any settings. I am not a big photographer, but as a point & click camera in my hands it replicated the image exactly as my eye saw it & my wifes growing knowledge is showing through in her pics.

Fishu · « **Reply #35 on:** May 26, 2006, 05:39:26 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by eagl
Examples - The first picture is what the camera thinks the world ought to look like. The second picture is what it looked like after I spent a few minutes processing the raw file. The real world looked a lot more like the second pic and although I know the greens are a touch overbright, the rest of the image really does match the real world a lot better.

My verdict: You're using a cheap Nikkor lens, in the range of 150-200 bucks.

eagl · « **Reply #36 on:** May 26, 2006, 10:05:56 PM »

The lense is the 18-70 kit from the D70, an upgrade from the stock 18-55 that usually comes with the D50.

Halo · « **Reply #37 on:** June 29, 2006, 11:44:31 PM »

Many digital camera auto settings produce remarkably accurate exposures, better than many photographers can get with manual controls. Likewise, editing pics for whatever reasons can be very challenging. It's easy to tweak this or that and trigger something that actually is not realistic, the main example being colors that are more vivid than they really are.

Of course the good thing is that sometimes we like the unrealistic result better than the way the scene actually looked. Beauty in the eye of the beholder. Artistic license.

It's also interesting to experiment with different people's perceptions, especially of color. In a class I once I brought five pieces of felt in what I saw as chartreuse, cinnamon, teal, blue violet, and hot pink. I asked the students to write down the colors they saw.

The results varied more than expected. While some people have varying degrees of color blindness, even the basically "normal" color vision majority often described notably different perceptions of the five colors.

Lens selection adds another huge variable. "Normal" human eyes supposedly see about the same field as 35mm cameras' 50mm lens, so many pictures are inherently more dramatic the farther the lens go from this midrange, e.g., 20 mm wide angles or 300 mm telephotos.

Faces look dramatically different photographed with the different perspectives of, say, 28mm, 50mm, 80mm, and 135mm.

The U.S. Navy used to be known for encouraging its photojournalists to NOT use the standard 50mm lens to get more striking pictures. Likewise some of the most famous black and white photos from WWII and before were achieved by using filters, especially red.

Which brings another interesting question: How does the sky really look -- is it the glare of a noon squint or the puffy clouds through sun glasses? Is the action of a runner the blur of 24 frames per second or whatever speed we "see" at or the frozen motion of a 1/1000 shutter?

A major effect of digital photos and the easy alteration by us masses is now more than ever we can never be sure how "accurate" any photo is. Life is all about perception anyway, so in digitalization we have gotten the control we have always wished for, the fusion of digital dots and digit fingers.

Sorry for rambling, but photography is sooooooo fascinating, and it's wonderful that more people than ever can now enjoy it through digital democratization.