DP2m: first images, first problems

marcodadofoto wrote:

Ciao Claudio,

first: always beautiful and "moody" images.

ciao Marco, grazie mille per i complimenti e i consigli, molto apprezzati

second: I'm not a techie,

me too

so Ill share with U some thoughts about the merrills.

Merrills have that great fault (the green/magenta blotches n the underexposed areas). I never succeded in really get rid of them. They particulary hurted me as I often do low light photography and with the Sigmas that's really a challenge. Seems anyway that the way You tried to minimize them are right.

The green/magenta blotches in the shadows do not really disturb me. In addition, for these blotches, the color noise reduction in LR5 works quite well. What really gets me sick are the quite huge purple areas in the skies, these do not seem to me the same blotches one finds in the shadows, they are present also in the highlights. What is strange is that in the Develop module of LR5 (using ProPhoto RGB) these purple areas are much less visible than in the Library module that, if I correctly understood creates sRGB previews. I don't know if the problem is also linked to mappings/translations between color spaces.

Merrills, on the other hand, have that "wow" or "3 D" factor, part of it is given by the "inner" accentuation of the microcontrast and of the shadows (have You realized how shadows are really deep and black?). I don't condier it a falut, it's part of the Merrill look that I personally appreciate. In Your images, imho, I would not see badly some more contrast.

the (micro)contrast is a matter of taste, personally I don't like very contrasted and super sharpened images, but this is just me, there is nothing wrong with the approach of Merrills

Anyway, to act on that look You could try in Sigma Photo Pro to set on -1 the fill light (but it doesn't always work well)

I tried negative values for fill light, but it is quite difficult to manage this parameter

, or - better - in Photoshop using not only the contrast levels but also working on the medium tones to reduce the effect.

I don't have photoshop, but I can try to work on the middle tones in LR, many thanks

As I said I'm no techie so I'm afraid that all.....

many thanks again Marco

ciao