Looking to Upgrade my E-510

G'day again mate

As Kurt and Jan have already said: post some images here. I agree.

You have PS Elements 7. That's great s/w. If you convert your RAW images into DNG files (basically, DNG is a RAW data container that can have all sorts of data written into it, without attempting to write data into a RAW file. RAW files can only be modified directly using a Hex Editor ... ). All versions of PSE back to version 3.01 can read any version of DNG file. Sort of a universal bucket for RAW files ...

You may have to download the separate DNG Converter/ACR package from the Adobe web site.

Aperture priority mode is fine, specially as a starting point, it is probably the most important of the 3 exposure parameters (ISO, f-stop and shutter speed). Not always, but a lot of the time.

As above. Almost everything that any beginner through to an advanced amateur (or pro ... ) wants or needs to do to either JPEGs or RAWs can be done with PSE7.

I have looked at many thousands of images. Some I would give my lefty to have taken; many I would have been happy to have taken; some I'm glad I didn't take. The last group have probably taught me more than either of the other two groups about critically examining my own images ...

Get hold of Freeman Patterson's "Photography and the Art of Seeing". Get the third edition second hand, if you can find it. Both it and the fourth edition have much the same text, but I personally think that the illustrative images in the third edition are better. I have both editions.

Also, check out the wonderful thread started by Big Scooter - "Reading for Novice Photographers" here:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/post/34337824

If you find it useful, don't forget to bookmark it. It deserves to be a "sticky", and would be in any other forum.

Interestingly, you see far more noise on a monitor than you ever will in print. The worse the monitor, the worse the noise ... The reason is simple. Even a high resolution, high bit monitor can only display around 27,000 sub-pixels per square inch. My Epson R3880 printer (even with its relatively large droplets) lays down around 4.5 million dots per square inch. This is over 150x the resolution. Your monitor simply cannot display fine gradations (neither can mine ... ), so it displays fairly large jumps instead. These appear to us to be noise.

Of course, camera sensors do get noisier at higher ISOs. It will show in print, but nowhere near as bad as it looks on your monitor!

They can get a tax deduction for it ...
Leaving that aside, there is a huge law of diminishing returns here. To get a small improvement in absolute IQ, one can pay a huge amount of money. New, the 14~54 MkII is around 3x the price of the 14~42 (at RRP). Is it 3x better? Not on your Nelly, it's not ...

Not nearly as much as buying a decent monitor can ...  I can recommend the ASUS ProArt PA246Q with a separate HDMI cable that doesn't come in the box with it. We have two of these ... Make sure your video card supports HDMI (sort of flat-ish plug a bit like an over-sized USB plug).

Hope that some of this drivel helps a bit.

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Regards, john from Melbourne, Australia.
(see profile for current gear)
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