K10D image quality

SKReich said:

I'd been using a Canon 10d prior to buying a Pentax 10D along with a
Tamron 18-250 zoom. I wanted a single very long range zoom to use
for travel, and there was nothing appropriate with image
stabilization at the time for the Canon. I don't shoot RAW on either
camera and don't do a lot of post-processing. Comparing photos taken
with the two cameras, though, the Pentax are soft, lacking in
sharpness and detail. Another thing that troubles me is that when I
set white balance to "Incandescant" on the Pentax, I often get very
blue, unnatural looking color; not so on the Canon. Anyone have any
ideas? Appreciate any help. Thanks.

Click to expand...

I have a K10D and a Canon 40D with 100-400mm L lens. The canon is softer than my Pentax with a Sigma 50-500mm lens (in either Jpeg or RAW). I did replace 2 40d bodies and 2 lenses with the same results. I do like the canon specially for the fast shooting speed and I do use it all the time. For color and sharpness I do prefer my K10D.

timo said:

SSz said:

Default settings of ACR doesnt work.

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Could you be more specific? If there is a problem I must have missed
it somehow ... Or is it a matter of personal preference (in the
matter of callibration, for example)?

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I think it's that when treating a system (ACR dialog) designed for user interaction, as if it was an automatic system (camera JPG engine), ACR just sits there on its default settings.

A little like a manual transmission car: start the engine, select Drive (I think this is what "first gear" is, not sure, it seems very noisy to engage), start off on your journey: well it's just hopeless - the engine either stalls or races, the car bunnyhops, it's terrible getting up to any acceptable speed and you can forget the motorway (freeway). Madness.

RP

SKReich said:

I'd been using a Canon 10d prior to buying a Pentax 10D along with a
Tamron 18-250 zoom. I wanted a single very long range zoom to use
for travel, and there was nothing appropriate with image
stabilization at the time for the Canon. I don't shoot RAW on either
camera and don't do a lot of post-processing. Comparing photos taken
with the two cameras, though, the Pentax are soft, lacking in
sharpness and detail. Another thing that troubles me is that when I
set white balance to "Incandescant" on the Pentax, I often get very
blue, unnatural looking color; not so on the Canon. Anyone have any
ideas? Appreciate any help. Thanks.

Click to expand...

The K10D doesn't lack sharpness, it lacks sharpening. Two different things. Its jpg engine is very conservative in sharpening (which in my opinion is a good thing, but obviously everyone has different tastes). If shooting RAW is not an option, simply add a little bit of sharpening to your jpgs in whatever image program you are using.

The incandescant issue you are having: well, first thing obviously, don't use this setting unless shooting in incandescant light. Second thing, try auto white balance. If that doesn't create satisfactory results, adjust your color balance in post production, that should be a quick fix. If all else fails, shoot RAW...it really is not that painful

If you shoot JPEG's, worth noting is that Pentax by default makes less image processing than your Canon did. This results in images lacking in sharpness, saturation and contrast compared to Canon images. Now, this is quite a matter of personal taste.

I dislike the over-processed and unnatural look of Canon, but if you do like the look you can set the K10D to Bright image tone instead of Natural image tone. This pumps up sharpness, saturation, contrast and mid-tone levels. You can pump up this further with the sharpness, contrast and saturation controls.

But do note that superzooms are lacking in image quality compared to shorter zooms and primes, so you can't get as much sharpness and contrast out of a superzoom as you can get from a good prime or zoom.

As for white balance being blue - on my colour corrected monitor I found the auto white balance giving a neutral colour balance with a touch of warmth. Not blue.

If you finds the preset to be too blue, then you can tweak the presets. Yes, the white balance in the K10D is very tweakable.

--
Take care
R
http://www.flickr.com/photos/raphaelmabo

SSz said:

I have bought my K10 for several months ago. It took a week to
realize that jpegs from this camera are of P&S quality. I shot only
RAW now. The problem is at it may be difficult to develop RAWs
sometimes. Default settings of ACR doesnt work. One needs to test
different RAW software including freeware and chose the best.

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It's interesting. I found the JPEG processing of the K10D is anything but P&S quality. JPEG photos from P&S cameras in general tend to be over-sharpened, over-saturated and over-contrasted. The K10D, in default mode, is very conservative.

I'm not sure about "may be difficult to develop RAWs sometimes." Processing RAW give you more decisions to make. If more decisions means more "difficult," so be it. It is like driving a car with automatic transmission or a car with manual transmission. I'm in the middle of post-processing about 2000 photos of my last vacation. I shoot RAW+JPEG. I find that post-processing RAW is NOT more difficult or time-consuming at all. In fact, I have not even looked at any of the JPEG photos yet.

BTW, I used LightRoom 1.4 and now LightRoom 2.

I sometimes find the shaprness lacking on the K10D but I also put it down to technique. ie Slight movement or poor light.

In general I find that by increasing the sharpness to +2 and the contrast to +1 in the normal mode, that the Jpegs are fine. If you shoot in raw and then convert to Jpeg using the pentax application using these settings then the jpeg are also good. It all goes down to personal preference. I foung a friends Cannon was sharper but the colours were unnatural.

Was very sharp! I also used the normal/standard setting w/sharpness and saturation pumped up a bit.

It was so good at Jpegs that 99% of th time, I never used the RAW images (shooting RAW + Jpeg).

--
Bob

huqedato said:

SKReich said:

... Anyone have any ideas? Appreciate any help. Thanks.

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Yeah, I do: shot raw or leave Pentax!
--
~ errant ~

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Hi guys!

Usually my shots are made exclusively in RAW. But sometimes, by mistake or curiosity, took RAW+JPG pictures and they looked very well or better than their unretouched DNG counterparts (camera set at Natural mode, all levels at 0) at the Lightroom screen.

Best regards,

Juan Carlos Martins
http://flickr.com/photos/pentaxdslr-hispanica/

Just wanna to share my feeling about the auto white balance operation: I thought that it needs a pure white piece inside the scene frame in order to operate and adjust adequately.

Best regards,

Juan Carlos Martins
http://flickr.com/photos/pentaxdslr-hispanica/

if is not too late, read this:

http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/pentax/k10d-review/

the changing of jpeg settings is too complicated for reviewers from dpreview.

It could be the kit lens if that's what's being used. I second the raw shooting. My images are sharper shooting raw. I heard that when you shoot raw that you need to turn the sharpening in camera to 0 and to sharpen in pp. I tried it and mine are still pretty sharp even when I reduce sharpening. Sharper than shooting Jpeg.

Looking at your previous posts you were shooting with C 28-135 IS and the 17-40 L.

First...the Tamon 18-250 or any superzoom is simply no match to these lenses. To get comparable quality, try the DA17-70, DA55-300, the Star or the Limiteds.

If you insist on using the Tamron 18-250, set your aperture to F/8 or darker - of course you'll need to up the ISO to 400 and maybe use SR or a tripod, too.

Then, I assume you've already tried Bright mode for JPG. My setting is Bright, Sharpness+1, Saturation-1, Contrast unchanged - this combination gives me pictures with sharpness that I like.

More, since you came from the C 10D, you may find the 100% crop performance not comparable at all - especially if you're using a superzoom on a 10MP sensor, comparing with L lenses on a 6MP sensor. For a fair comparison, reduce your K10D picture to 6MP.

If doing these still don't give you sharp pics with the details that you want, then maybe you have a FF/BF problem. Try using manual focus and see if the camera has FF/BF - if so send the combo to Pentax to correct it.

C bodies have a tendency to correct less on Tungsten WB. If you find the Tungsten WB on Pentax too blue, you can fine tune it to give it more yellow/red. As far as I can remember, fine tuning WB was not possible at all on a Can*n 10D.

SKReich said:

I'd been using a Canon 10d prior to buying a Pentax 10D along with a
Tamron 18-250 zoom. I wanted a single very long range zoom to use
for travel, and there was nothing appropriate with image
stabilization at the time for the Canon. I don't shoot RAW on either
camera and don't do a lot of post-processing. Comparing photos taken
with the two cameras, though, the Pentax are soft, lacking in
sharpness and detail. Another thing that troubles me is that when I
set white balance to "Incandescant" on the Pentax, I often get very
blue, unnatural looking color; not so on the Canon. Anyone have any
ideas? Appreciate any help. Thanks.

Click to expand...

No, the manual white balance adjustment needs that but not the auto white balance.

The auto white balance can't actually see what's white, it doesn't know it so it doesn't matter for it. It makes a guess without it.

Manual adjustment needs a white setting point as a reference for all other colours.
This is why - theoretically - manual adjustment is the best.
But in my experience the auto white balance works very good outdoors.
--
Take care
R
http://www.flickr.com/photos/raphaelmabo

This is something that crops up time and time again on here. Firstly it is dependant upon what lens you have bolted to your body. I have the 16-45 and cannot fault it. You have got a 13x monster and expect the impossible. However help is at hand and staying in jpeg mode all you need to do is push the menu button and on the first screen scroll down from image size to sharpness, saturation and contrast where you can set them to your own preferences.
regards
Trev

michael paul beard said:

It could be the kit lens if that's what's being used. I second the
raw shooting. My images are sharper shooting raw. I heard that when
you shoot raw that you need to turn the sharpening in camera to 0 and
to sharpen in pp. I tried it and mine are still pretty sharp even
when I reduce sharpening. Sharper than shooting Jpeg.

Click to expand...

if I'm not mistaken in-camera sharpening settings have no effect one way or the other on the raw file (ditto contrast and saturation). In-camera settings such as WB may have an effect on the way the raw conversion comes out by default, but you can change that; they have no effect on the file itself.
--
tim

Roland Mabo said:

Manual adjustment needs a white setting point as a reference for all
other colours.
This is why - theoretically - manual adjustment is the best.

Click to expand...

Roland Mabo said:

But in my experience the auto white balance works very good outdoors.

Click to expand...

I agree with that - in ACR raw files (using Lightroom) based on the camera's own auto settings come out pretty good most of the time. Certainly better than ACR's own auto WB, which often looks very strange to me. I've never got into the finer points of callibration - maybe my results could be improved but I'm very happy with the camera's AWB in most situations.
--
tim

The type of sharpness algorithm implemented in the K10 emphasises texture detail and leaves edges less sharp (with no halos) as this is the preferred style in Japan. It does have advantages - fine textures do show up well on the K10D.

This does work well in print too - it simply looks less artificial.

RAW is the best solution, but the second best answer is to just give it a tad of unsharp mask in photoshop/elements/lightroom before you display or print it. Please understand that the sharpness applied should match the desired output medium - there is no "right amount" - and that starting from something already oversharpened can be a disaster.

If you dont want to PP thats fine, but you are really not going to get the most out of a DSLR unless you learn to do at least a bit. It takes 30 seconds.

SKReich said:

I'd been using a Canon 10d prior to buying a Pentax 10D along with a
Tamron 18-250 zoom. I wanted a single very long range zoom to use
for travel, and there was nothing appropriate with image
stabilization at the time for the Canon. I don't shoot RAW on either
camera and don't do a lot of post-processing. Comparing photos taken
with the two cameras, though, the Pentax are soft, lacking in
sharpness and detail. Another thing that troubles me is that when I
set white balance to "Incandescant" on the Pentax, I often get very
blue, unnatural looking color; not so on the Canon. Anyone have any
ideas? Appreciate any help. Thanks.

Click to expand...

--
Steve
When I can master technique I'll be a photographer.
When I can realise a vision I'll be an artist.
When I get paid I'll be a professional.

In DCRP's review of the K10D, the reviewer gives a couple of suggestions to help imprive the IQ of it's JPGs--one to change the image tone from natural to bright and to bump up the sharpness and contrast settings. Here's the link to the review, where the reviewer includes visual examples of the difference between JPGs at default settings, adjusted JPGs, and converted RAW images:
http://dcresource.com/reviews/pentax/k10d-review/index.shtml

As for me, these days, I'm shooting mainly RAW, as it's a lot easier to work with. Let's face it, not all of your images are going to be 100% perfect straight out of the camera.

Heather
--
http://www.pbase.com/heatherb/
Never mind the diamonds...LENSES are a girl's best friend!



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