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.

Obviously not well lit or you wouldn't have required ISO 400 + 1/20 sec. at f/1.4. Again the darker rendition is also due to the -.3 exp. cmp which you set. If it were well lit the camera would have been able to lower the ISO, raise the shutter speed and stop down the lens. All of which it would have done. It could not. No other camera could have done otherwise.

Why wouldn't this be ideal lighting conditions?

The extreme bright windows included in the scene make the lighting condition the opposite of ideal -- in fact prohibitive. That bright light flares the lens and massively over-exposes relative to the other low ambient light in the room. SMART mode doesn't mean the camera can read your mind and tell which one you wanted correctly exposed.

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?

The windows.

It was almost 11:00 AM and the lamp was unlit.

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?

Yes.

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.

Except that -.3 exp. cmp that you set.

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?

No. But SMART mode doesn't mean the camera can solve impossible problems. Granted the marketing is a pack of lies for all these cameras. There are limits to what you can successfully photograph given expectation levels and standards.

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

https://flic.kr/s/aHsk27EWqW

And this small album contains equally bad photos that the camera was unable to deal with because the condition was prohibitive or that function really doesn't work well (AWB). The photo of the batteries totally sucks -- white balance and contrast are way off. The bright sun through the barn is a lot like your kitchen windows. The white balance on the BMW in the garage is terrible. White balance and contrast on the hibiscus is badly off:

This camera did not perform better than the EX-2.

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.

No they weren't -- see above.

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.

And you didn't set a -.3 exp. cmp. Consider that, given the exposure in that barn photo, you had 5 full stops of additional light. That barn was 2^5 brighter than your kitchen.

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