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Adobe MRW plugin!!!

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Sounds great Fred,

Cropping is not a problem as long as we can see the difference between the the different work-flows....

Dont let the bed bugs byte,
Peter Marina
Fred Briggs said:
It's OK - I got the gist.

Thing is I've never posted any pictures before so I have to figure
that out first. I have justed opened an account at pbase so maybe
I can just put some examples on there and post a link.

Also these are big files and I'm not sure that compressing them
will retain the detail as the differences are only really visible
at high magnification, so maybe I will try full resolution, but
seriously cropped down to small portions of the image.

Anyway it will have to be tomorrow now as it's 1:20 am UK time and
I seriously need my beauty sleep! Thanks for the interest. I
will post again if/when I get some examples on-line.

Fred
Peter Marina said:
Peter Marina said:
Peter Marina
Fred Briggs said:
Just beware that transaction-one are having problems with the
installer which is supposed to appear in your browser after you pay
  • needless to say it crashed on me at this point giving a load of
apache server error messages. The transaction did complete
however - i.e. they got my money and I got no software.

This was last night - the phone lines were dead and the emails
wern't answered - still haven't been, but I got through this
morning and got pointed at an ftp download site.

Pleased with the s/w so far, and yes it does seem to reduce noise
somewhat through the smoothing setting, seemingly without losing
any real detail. I made a tiff and an mrw of the same scene some
time ago, and use these for comparison. It doesn't seem to have
the problem with jaggies on edges that Divu did. This seemed to be
due to sharpening, where the darker pixels used to accentuate edges
were a little irregular in position - this didn't seem to happen on
the tiffs with in-camera sharpening.

Still not sure about colour accuracy - I need to try some more shots.

I agree with the earlier comments about ease of use, etc. It is
also very useful to zoom in and see the real effect of the
smoothing and sharpening settings.

Fred
Athegn said:
Try this:-

http://www.transaction-one.com/gs/html/a/adobe/shopping001/en/home.jsp
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
--
Peter Marina

'...I sometimes try to help the humans...' Cosmo Kramer.
Click to expand...
--
Peter Marina

'...I sometimes try to help the humans...' Cosmo Kramer.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
--
Peter Marina

'...I sometimes try to help the humans...' Cosmo Kramer.
 
BRivers said:
Your stocks plummeting are not the result of an impending war. The
stock market has been overvalued since about 1998. As we reached
the end of the century, the landscape changed, namely Greenspan
jerked the short term borrowing rates around like he was sitting at
a slot machine in Vegas. Companies slowed their spending, and with
the onset of multiple events, such as the ludicrous pursuit of the
White House by the Democratic camp, consumers became wary. Not to
mention the leadership in companies. Hated to vent here, but I'm
just tired of people placing specific blame with regard to the
market to the current administration when it's shared equally by
the previous administration. And I'm not even a Bush supporter!

It's probably not appropriate to have a political debate on this forum but I can't resist replying. It is ,of course, naive to suggest that the dive in the stock market is only due to the coming war. I think however that your attempt to lay blame for the current economic situation equally on the head of Clinton et Al takes some believing. Do you recall the famous phrase' It's the economy stupid!' that Clinton used against Bush Senior. LIke father like son.
Click to expand...
America has taken its eye off the ball & is too pre-occupied with its Rambo-like desire to clean up the world to notice that the problems in their economy need addressing.

Don't get me wrong - the events of Sept.11 were unforgiveable and I do understand the anger & hurt that they caused but violence is not alwaays the way to prevent further violence. In our own case I think that the events in Northern Ireland prove that to be true.

To return to my original comment - are you saying that the stock situation will not improve once this business is out of the way? That is , of course, assuming that there are not too many ENRON type senarios still waiting in the wings!

If ony more people could confine their bickering to sorting out such issues as digtal noise and the like.( I can't believe that I mentioned noise - please forgive me!)
Brivers said:
keith caldwell said:
John Merrill said:
I'm a Mac user and I bought it. It's very fast and the interface is
great. I haven't done much with it other than goof around. BTW
Adobe makes it clear that the plugin wil be included with a future
version of PS which is expected to have greatly enhanced support
for 16 bit color. You can pay for it now or get it for "free"
later.

John Merrill
Click to expand...
Am I just being cynical? The fact that Adobe want to charge so
much for something that others are giving away tends to suggest
that V8.0 may not be a big advance over V7.0 and they want the
extra plugin ( which you describe as 'free' in V8.0) to act as a
lure to us poor Dimage owners.

I appreciate that students can get a 'cheap' copy for $200 but
speaking as someone whose investments in the stock market are
continuing to plummet thanks to George W and the forthcoming war I
have to say even $200 is quite a lot for a pensioner
--
keith c
Click to expand...
--
http://www.pbase.com/brivers
Click to expand...
--
keith c
 
I would be interested in sample as well...therefore Peter is not the only interested one. Other forums, with other cameras say, that ARC is better then the nikon or Canon Software, in terms" eas of use", and the quality of the image.

To me there would be these advantages:
  • seeing the files directly in the color working space, and beeing able to set the basic adjustements before converting to 8 bit. This would be the big gain, compared with tiff. (or DiVu)
  • Question: Adobe states that the files can be output by 8 or 16bits; but the chip in the 7iMinolta allows 12 bits originally. Is it possible to keep the ARC-output, i.e. the tiffs, in 12 bits, or is it necessairy to jump on 16 bits, for doing further highbits adjustements, like curves, etc.??
The jump from 12 to 16 bits would'nt bring any advantages, (would'nt make the image richer, just the files would became bigger)
 
Well not just larger Montespluga,

16 bit brings a higher level of accuracy. Look at the extra 4 bit of 16 bits as having extra 16 steps between every step of the original12 bits. It's like having a higher resolution but for color information only.

True that the original information might have only 12 bits but when you do modify or adjust your colors, you can actualy go in between the orginal data steps and by a precision of 16 steps (4 bits) . So you gain in accuracy in your modifications only, not in the original data.

Peter Marina
montespluga said:
I would be interested in sample as well...therefore Peter is not
the only interested one. Other forums, with other cameras say, that
ARC is better then the nikon or Canon Software, in terms" eas of
use", and the quality of the image.

To me there would be these advantages:
  • seeing the files directly in the color working space, and beeing
able to set the basic adjustements before converting to 8 bit. This
would be the big gain, compared with tiff. (or DiVu)
  • Question: Adobe states that the files can be output by 8 or
16bits; but the chip in the 7iMinolta allows 12 bits originally. Is
it possible to keep the ARC-output, i.e. the tiffs, in 12 bits, or
is it necessairy to jump on 16 bits, for doing further highbits
adjustements, like curves, etc.??

The jump from 12 to 16 bits would'nt bring any advantages,
(would'nt make the image richer, just the files would became bigger)
Click to expand...
--
Peter Marina

'...I sometimes try to help the humans...' Cosmo Kramer.
 
Hi,

I've got the Adobe RAW plugin and I have been comparing results with Divu, and with a control tiff of the same scene. I've done two conversions in Adobe RAW - one with the default settings, and one tweaked to give what I thought was a better result. The Divu conversion uses default settings, i.e. keeps the camera settings, which in turn are all defaults, i.e normal sharpening, etc, and auto WB.

All four pictures have been converted fvrom Adobe RGB to SRGB before cropping and savings as jpegs. The jpegs are about 400kB each, and I've posted them on Pbase at http://www.pbase.com/fred_jb/adobe_raw_tests if anyone would like to look at them

Feel free to download for closer examination - just right click once you are looking at the full size picture and it should save locally without any further download as it is already in memory.

Areas I have found significant are:

Noise, color and definition of roof tiles and varnished fascia board just below them

Top diagonal of yellow slide and adjacent vertical blue bar

Background detail in fence panels

In particular, I have never been happy with Divu's rendering of the slide edge - it seems to place the dark pixels used for edge sharpening in a slightly irregular way leading to a sawtooth effect which is admittedly more apparent at high magnification.

The second of the two Adobe RAW conversions uses non-default settings as follows:

Shadow 13 v 0 default
Brightness 60 v 50 default
Contrast 60 v 50 default
Sharpness 40 v 25 default
Smoothing 30 v 25 default

The smoothing setting seems instrumental in lessening the noise visible at high magnification, but if used sensibly does not seem to remove much/any useful detail so seems quite effective.

All in all I'm very satisfied with the results, and the much improved user interface/workflow the plugin provides, so will probably now move from shooting in tiff to raw. However, I'm looking forward to more in-depth analysis and views on the Adobe RAW plugin from the more learned/expert members of the forum.

Hope this is useful/interesting.

Fred
Sam said:
All I gotsda say is YEAH Bay-Beeeee.........

--
Where did you say the 'make coffee' button was on this camera?
Click to expand...
 
Peter
your step-modell is right...

aren't you loosing with these extraconversions the gain of these 4 bits?? I wouldn't take these 4 bits , if converting, to seroius, therefore I asked for the 12-bit output, which is not implementet in the actual photoshop.
I alwith try to reduce conversions and to many changings as much as I can...

Basically this means that ARC is made for the "bigger" digicams, and on the fly, they took the dimage with. Or - that the minolta camera is something in between, as a prosumer.... the real pro's are enthusiastic about the ARC

regards montespluga
 
Fred

thanks, + might have a look later, as the link doesn't works at the moment

To me, an argument pro ARC is the fact the Photoshop 8, when caming in the localised versions, which might bee the end of the year, will run OS-X only.

whats concerning the jpg 2000, you l'get it here (for free)

http://www.fnordware.com/
 
Fred, et al.

I have the Picture Window Pro image editing software. This program can count the unique colors in an image. Here's the data for Fred's full size image files.

IMAGE UNIQUE COLORS
Control 464,493
DIVU RAW 456,075
PS Raw 410,620
PS Raw Tweaked 517,620

These data align pretty well with how the images look to me. The straight PS Raw looks less colorfull. Take a look at the roof area for example and compare the various files.

My thoughts are that the PS Raw default settings for the D7HI are a little flat. Some increase in the contrast setting makes a big difference.

For example, I had an image I shot yesterday using Fine JPEG and Raw. Both shots had the same exposure setting - only change was the color settings on the camera. The JPEG file was adjusted for more dynamic range using Levels in Photoshop to adjust the contrast. I used a gamma adjustment to brighten the image up a bit, since most of it was in light shade. The Raw file was opened with the PS plugin and adjusted with the plugin by increasing the contrast to increase the dynamic range, using the histogram, and increasing the exposure adjustment to match the JPEG image as much as possible. In other words I was trying to see the results of adjusting the image in raw camera data versus the in-camera processed data.

Here are the color numbers.

IMAGE UNIQUE COLORS

JPEG 112,968
Raw 437,877

The difference shows up in the image too. The JPEG image could be worked on some more to more closely match the Raw, but again I ws trying to see the results of the same adjustment steps.

Probably should temper this by pointing out I've only worked on a couple of images. But, at this point I like the PS Raw plug-in a lot.

Charlie
 
Hi Charles,

I agree with your conclusions on the default settings, though maybe my tweaked version is a little over-saturated due to the contrast hike - but I didn't touch the saturation slider.

I do think there is a small but usefull reduction on noise with the Adobe plugin - have you seen this in your images? I think it is fairly visible in the blue bar and in the varnished panel below the roof tiles.

Re colour counts - I can see how this might be significant on the original Tiff or Raw files, but I'm not sure how reliable this is with jpegs - doesn't jpeg compression potentially reduce total number of colours anyway as part of its data reduction strategy?

Fred
Charles Lott said:
Fred, et al.

I have the Picture Window Pro image editing software. This program
can count the unique colors in an image. Here's the data for Fred's
full size image files.

IMAGE UNIQUE COLORS
Control 464,493
DIVU RAW 456,075
PS Raw 410,620
PS Raw Tweaked 517,620

These data align pretty well with how the images look to me. The
straight PS Raw looks less colorfull. Take a look at the roof area
for example and compare the various files.

My thoughts are that the PS Raw default settings for the D7HI are a
little flat. Some increase in the contrast setting makes a big
difference.

For example, I had an image I shot yesterday using Fine JPEG and
Raw. Both shots had the same exposure setting - only change was the
color settings on the camera. The JPEG file was adjusted for more
dynamic range using Levels in Photoshop to adjust the contrast. I
used a gamma adjustment to brighten the image up a bit, since most
of it was in light shade. The Raw file was opened with the PS
plugin and adjusted with the plugin by increasing the contrast to
increase the dynamic range, using the histogram, and increasing the
exposure adjustment to match the JPEG image as much as possible. In
other words I was trying to see the results of adjusting the image
in raw camera data versus the in-camera processed data.

Here are the color numbers.

IMAGE UNIQUE COLORS

JPEG 112,968
Raw 437,877

The difference shows up in the image too. The JPEG image could be
worked on some more to more closely match the Raw, but again I ws
trying to see the results of the same adjustment steps.

Probably should temper this by pointing out I've only worked on a
couple of images. But, at this point I like the PS Raw plug-in a
lot.

Charlie
Click to expand...
 
Hello again Fred,

Yes there is some noise reduction that seems to be done while maintaing a crisp look to the image and I find the edges are more distinct.

Yeah the color counts is probably just a validation of what we can see. I was looking for something to eliminate the placebo effect. The size of the image has an effect too, of course. There's some variation amongst your test files.

As far as the JPEG compression eliminating colors, I thought the way it worked was by grouping identical colors or nearly identica ones, depending on the degree of compression. But, that's kind of the point. I would think that an image that had more unique colors would be more vibrant and would have a more three dimensional look. My knowledge is very limited though, so that may not be the case.

The big thing for me though is the ablity to tweak the images real fast and maybe even the potential to automate the tweaking of a whole lot of similar ones.

Finally, I don't think your tweaked image is over saturated. I think the one using the default settings is too flat.

We'll have to compare notes after using the plug-in some more.

Best regards,
Charlie
 
If I understand you correctly, you'd like to save images in 12-bit mode. This is probably not so much a limitation of Photoshop as it is a limitation of file formats; I'm not aware of any file format that permits 12 bits per sample. JPEG, for example, allows 8 bits; TIFF allows 8 or 16 bits (and some modes lower than 8 bits, but I don't remember what); I don't know about PSD. It's much easier--if a little space-inefficient--to pad 12-bit values into 16 bits, as multiples of 8 bits are easier to deal with for programmers.

Cheers,
Jeremy

--
Jeremy L. Rosenberger
http://www.frii.com/~jeremy/
 
Nice shots Fred,

and thanx for supplying the samples. Noise is deffinately lower in the new Adobe Plug-in. Dont know about the colors as I havent seen the original sceen. The level of detail look better to me on the TIFF file. Maybe the sharpening was more agressive in the TIFF. What do you guys think???

Peter Marina
Fred Briggs said:
I've got the Adobe RAW plugin and I have been comparing results
with Divu, and with a control tiff of the same scene. I've done
two conversions in Adobe RAW - one with the default settings, and
one tweaked to give what I thought was a better result. The Divu
conversion uses default settings, i.e. keeps the camera settings,
which in turn are all defaults, i.e normal sharpening, etc, and
auto WB.

All four pictures have been converted fvrom Adobe RGB to SRGB
before cropping and savings as jpegs. The jpegs are about 400kB
each, and I've posted them on Pbase at
http://www.pbase.com/fred_jb/adobe_raw_tests if anyone would like
to look at them

Feel free to download for closer examination - just right click
once you are looking at the full size picture and it should save
locally without any further download as it is already in memory.

Areas I have found significant are:

Noise, color and definition of roof tiles and varnished fascia
board just below them

Top diagonal of yellow slide and adjacent vertical blue bar

Background detail in fence panels

In particular, I have never been happy with Divu's rendering of the
slide edge - it seems to place the dark pixels used for edge
sharpening in a slightly irregular way leading to a sawtooth effect
which is admittedly more apparent at high magnification.

The second of the two Adobe RAW conversions uses non-default
settings as follows:

Shadow 13 v 0 default
Brightness 60 v 50 default
Contrast 60 v 50 default
Sharpness 40 v 25 default
Smoothing 30 v 25 default

The smoothing setting seems instrumental in lessening the noise
visible at high magnification, but if used sensibly does not seem
to remove much/any useful detail so seems quite effective.

All in all I'm very satisfied with the results, and the much
improved user interface/workflow the plugin provides, so will
probably now move from shooting in tiff to raw. However, I'm
looking forward to more in-depth analysis and views on the Adobe
RAW plugin from the more learned/expert members of the forum.

Hope this is useful/interesting.

Fred
Sam said:
All I gotsda say is YEAH Bay-Beeeee.........

--
Where did you say the 'make coffee' button was on this camera?
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
--
Peter Marina

'...I sometimes try to help the humans...' Cosmo Kramer.
 
I would really like to see an example with a big patch of problematic blueish hues. The noise is what has kept me from getting this camera.

RT
 
Rampa

I really think the so-called noise issue is pretty academic. It would be nice if Adobe RAW can reduce it without losing real detail, but I have never found it an issue anyway at normal levels of magnification. You will always see noise if you go up to high magnification on-screen.

I regard prints as the real test, and good well lit shots print really well up to 10x8 with no visible noise. I haven't printed bigger except once when I cropped out the central third of a picture and blew it up to 10x8, even that was excellent with a little extra sharpening.

Of course you get more noise in low light conditions, but this is true of all digital cameras. It just depends what you want to do with the camera.

Have you looked at the Minolta photo competitions over at http://www.network54.com/Hide/Forum/151930 ? You will see some good work there, and noise does not generally seem to be a problem.

Regarding blue areas, I have a pic with a lot of deep blue sky in the latest competition - http://www.pbase.com/brachiopod/contest_25__geometry

Pic is titled Art Over Geometry. This was originated as a tiff and I have printed it out at approx 8x8 and to me noise is just not visible.

I have technology perfectionist tendencies myself, and it's easy to get drawn into the technology issues, but at the end of the day I think these are secondary to the creative aspects.

Good luck with making your decision. Whatever camera you get, I am sure you will get a lot of pleasure from taking pictures.

Fred
Rampa said:
I would really like to see an example with a big patch of
problematic blueish hues. The noise is what has kept me from
getting this camera.

RT
Click to expand...
 
Athegn said:
Try this:-

http://www.transaction-one.com/gs/html/a/adobe/shopping001/en/home.jsp
Click to expand...
Thanks Athegn...I tried the link above, and it worked a treat for me. The plug-in downloaded and installed with no problems. Don't know why I was charged 21% VAT on the purchase, though: VAT here in the UK is 17.5%, and it looks like transaction-one.com is a UK-based outfit.

I've loaded a few old RAW images I have from my D7, and so far the results look MUCH better than DIVU-processed versions of the same file. The colour is much more natural, no contrast problems and I don't see as much noise or "jaggies". I shall have to start taking everything in RAW mode from now on to give this plug-in a thorough testing. (I gave up shooting in RAW a few months after I got the camera for lack of a good processing program at that time.)

Thanks again

Robin
 
ARC is great !!

Just tested it, 10 minutes ago. Well, I'm not familiar with all the settings as i.e. tint (have to RTFM) but works fine, just used it on sight.... very much faster, handling is very much easier than DIVU.... 7i-noise reduction/DIVU edge problem is fair better

to me this is worth the money....giving thg 7i a push in the pro-direction; allowing to edit the shots in something like A-4, 300 dpi (for publishing) This is due to a interpolation which is better than the photoshop bicubic . (in sense of noise/edge)

regards, montespluga
 
well, I did a serious test this afternoon, and had the time now, to look at the results:
compared tiffs vs DIVU-RAW vs ACR:
Well we know all, tiffs aren't the highlight...

DIVU - if not such a sucker on handling- even on 1 22'-monitor- took me 2 - 3 x the time than ARC (on mac) is fair better than tiffs... but the histogramm also shows, that ARC wins:
  • for histogramm (ca 50 % flattend for DIVU and tiffs only)
  • for handling (bloody little, unprecise DIVU windows)
  • for color accurancy
  • for contrast
and for noise as well.

The ARC provides smoots picture, these are stable, and can be worked furthermore, without loss of important picture informations....
 
can you give me the link to the one that you have? this one only let you output file at half the size.
Mange said:
Thanks...this is the one I didn't have.

Mange
MinotaMan said:
Mange said:
MinoltaMan,

I have only one of the free plug-ins. Can you list links for both?

Mange
Click to expand...
http://www.dalibor.cz/minolta/plugin.htm

I can email you the other. It is not as nice though. I tried it
first, sometime ago.

MinoltaMan
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
--
Daniella
http://www.photosig.com/viewuser.php?id=26918
http://www.pbase.com/zylen
C7OO FORUM: http://www.c700uz.com

c7OOuz, Dimage-7, Tcon14tele, C210tele, Cokin-173, Grad-ND, Hoya-red-Intensifier, Hoya R72.
 
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