Samples Galleries

There are 26 images in the samples gallery. Please do not reproduce any of these images on a website or any newsletter / magazine without prior permission. I make the originals available for private users to download to their own machines for personal examination or printing (in conjunction with this review), I do so in good faith, please don't abuse it.

Unless otherwise noted images taken with no particular settings at 1600 x 1200 resolution. Images reduced down to 800 x 600 to fit onto your screen, some images have been level corrected (I'm a strong believer in the Digital Darkroom) as always the original untouched image is available by clicking on this reduced image.

Sony MVC-CD1000 Samples Gallery One (26 images)
(posted 27/September/2000)

Digital Darkroom

It's important to clarify the methods I use to produce the monitor size image (1024 x 768 in this case) for the samples galleries. I always run my images through my "Digital Darkroom", that's simply deciding if the image needs cropping, level correction or sharpening and simply applying that, I do this for all the samples galleries. The key to a good digital camera is how much and how often you need to do it.

Remember this never affects the untouched originals in the galleries which are always available by clicking on the half sized image.

In this example I've simply stretched the histogram (by bringing the black point up to the beginning of the "image data" and bringing the white point down to the end of the "image data"), I've also applied an Unsharpen Mask (0.5 pixel radius, 59%).

Typical gallery preparation procedure is (Photoshop 5.5/6.0):

• Load image
• Half size (down-sampled 50%)
• Visual check image
• Check levels, correct slight over or underexposure
• Test Unsharpen Mask (0.3 - 0.6 pixel radius, 40% - 90%), better or worse?
• Paste copyright message
• Save as smaller image

Things I (try to) avoid:

• Altering the image using curves (nonlinear adjustments permanently break the image)
• Increasing saturation (may look more pleasing but is less likely to be true to the original shot)
• White balance correction (though I may do this for a standard gallery I try to avoid it for review samples)
• Touchup of any kind