Sunday, March 26, 2006

Raw vs. jpeg D70 example





Top image is the wide shot with D70, captured that wall once as jpeg and once as raw.

Next two images are the crops, top was RAW original, bottom was JPEG

After cropping, the RAW had to get converted to TIFF, then to 8 bit before converting to JPEG in order to upload here.

You can still see the difference, especially the shadow area on the pot.

Latitude tests should be next

Sunday, March 19, 2006

More issues with digital time-lapse





The 3 frame grabs happened over a period of an hour - same settings as previous post.

That sun flare got pretty overwhelming - and some frames got hit worse!

I didn't expect the sun to flare out so much because of clouds in the distance that looked like they were increasing. Also I had underexposed the image pre-sun expecting the latitude to hold. Part of me was holding out thinking the resulting 'hit' of sun woul look cool.

Silly me. Not only as I not exposing film, but I had captured in JPEG rather than in RAW mode (which I imagine would have had more latitude?)

Also, these images were only able to have been corrected to what you see, couldn't go any further because there was essentially no info in there.

Friday, March 17, 2006

Tiimelapse / long exposures with the Nikon D70s





When using heavy ND filters on the D70s, I get a heavy magenta cast that I can't seem to correct with the WB feature.

I shot this test partially to see how far I can correct while shooting in the highest quality JPEG setting, not the RAW mode.

The reason for me shooting in JPEG rather than RAW is to get the most number of frames as possible on one CF card (in this case, 1gb). With the JPEG mode in this card, I can get about 480 frames (even though the counter erroneously states 290) rather than aoout a third of that. This means about 20 seconds at 24fps.

The question is, how far can I correct in JPEG mode versus RAW? And is JPEG sufficient?

So here are the first parts of my tests : first with JPEG. Keep in mind the corrections were done quickly and with a 12" powerbook - not the greatest way of color correcting.

The 3 pictures above show : uncorrected, corrected A, corrected B.

The images were transferred to my laptop, corrected in photoshop (mainly using the Levels, Color Balance and Saturation tools), and compressed in order to publish here.

Camera stats are : 18mm lens, f/22, 30 second exp., ND3.0, noise reduction off.

I was surprised at how far I could take the image, yet it seemed a little tricky to get rid of that magenta cast and bring it back to a 'normal' look.