Basic Photoshop settings for RAW JPEG conversion.. EX2F?

frascati wrote:

The camera program is doing the best it can in a really difficult (I'd call impossible) lighting condition.

Please explain. A well lit kitchen in daylight. Why wouldn't this be ideal lighting conditions?

Because while our eyes tend to think it's well lit, it's really not. Our eyes adjust very quickly to new lighting conditions. We know it is not "well lit" in a relative sense because of the huge difference in exposure outside and inside (when exposing for inside the kitchen what is outside the windows is completely blown out). This actually is a pretty challenging lighting condition.

I've been so used to the older SL420 that I'm 100 percent confident this would not have been a problem. OK, 90 percent confident. 80? By "direct light source" do you mean the outdoors through the window or the lamp? It was almost 11:00 AM and the lamp was unlit.

The window.

The camera program assumes hand-holding by you. Therefore the 1/20th sec. shutter speed. With a small sensor camera like this ISO 400 is high -- very high and the camera program is reluctant to raise it any higher. Good call there by the camera. That leaves you with f/1.4 plain and simple.

In Smart mode the camera makes the ISO 400 "call", doesn't it? In either case I had Iso set to Auto at the time. Again back to my point. In "smart" with everything menu option set to automatic, the camera is making the "call" 100 percent. Should corrections be necessary in the menu set when the camera, in 'smart' has proposed to "easily capture the desired photo by automatically detecting the scene" according to the in-camera description?

Here is a small album of images from the older camera.

https://flic.kr/s/aHsk27EWqW

Honestly I think that you're just being tougher on the new camera. Why not try out some of the exact same shots?  That said, something about that metering seems off.  I know your kitchen is dark (indoors is pretty much always dark, it's almost a rule), but I wouldn't have thought it was 1/2 second exposure dark.  I'm in a room with only artificial light right now and my metering settings are like f/2.2, ISO 400, 1/40 second, whereas for that kitchen shot yours is f/2.2, ISO 400, 1/2 second... I don't think the room I'm in is more than 4 stops brighter than your kitchen.

I'm seeing your previous camera blowing a lot of highlights in easier conditions though.

I was a bit spoiled, even inspired to laziness, by this camera since these images always seemed surprisingly good for just leaving the camera in auto and snapping away. I never had cause to crop, enlarge, or peep beyond what my wsxga screen displayed to me. Close zooms on these do break down a bit quicker than EX2F images posted here. But the colors, perhaps a tad saturated, were spot on next to the subject.

Adjust your EX2F colors?

Sharpness, contrast, and some sort of indefinable, maybe film-like, good looks to my eye. There are few old barn photos that are similar to the kitchen shots. Bright sunlit sources in the frame, but for the most part the SL420 handled them. One with the brightest window on the outside sun is underexposed, but not even enough to render the shot useless.

These are among hundreds of images on my hard-drive from the SL420. So my first auto jpegs out of the EX2F, and up till present in fact, just don't compare.

I'd set the exposure compensation on the EX2F -.3 on at least a few separate recommendations which seemed borne out by consistent overexposed highlights in the jpegs.

With as bright of a source as an outdoor window you may wish to go further than -.3 if you're trying to keep it from blowing out... but first lets figure out what's wrong with this metering... it's weird to me.  The barn shots, the outdoors was still blown out, so what you're trying to do is get better results on the indoors portion?  Not too worried about making it also do outside at the same time, right?

Is this more like what you wanted?

I can zero it and reshoot the kitchen shots, but I am pretty confident it will not make a great deal of difference.