Tried raw but went back to JPG (#3)

yellodog said:

Apart from the fact that the TZ100 doesn't have f5.9 along the whole zoom, it has a newer sensor and above all a new Venus engine which rather nullifies any theoretical calculations. 3 years is a long time in the digital camera market.

Click to expand...

Sure. That's why I was careful to always limit my comment to "at the long end". The graph here http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/power-zoom-panasonic-lumix-dmc-zs100-tz100-review shows the transition between f/8 equivalent at the wide end and f/16 equivalent at the tele end.

I don't know any data to suggest an improvement in the sensor or processing between the FZ200 and the TZ100. People still swear by the FZ150, even.

--

Sherm

Thanks Sherm, that reveals the problem very well.

So I wonder if it’s an error in the demosaicing process or if it’s a faulty pixel on the sensor? Actually, I saw that there are more of them in that file - on the yellow area of the feather (with a purplish colour) and two (one reddish and one green) on the white background below the upper circuit board.

It seems that since they don’t appear in the OOC JPG that they must be removed by the in-camera processing. Have you come across similar coloured pixels before when using PN on your FZ200, etc?

Also, I wondered, since you have a lot of experience with using PN, what you were able to achieve when you processed those files? I’d be very grateful if you could post them.

Ian

gardenersassistant said:

. . . . I mentioned in a reply to you in Part II of this thread that Lightroom restricts you to "sensible" options. That is the case with the colours. It only allows a limited range of hue adjustment and so I couldn't reproduce Sherm's result with the egret. As with some other things (like precisely controlled and/or complicated cloning for example), you need to use another product when you want to go beyond what Lightroom regards as sensible/useful.

Click to expand...

PS to my first reply to this paragraph - perhaps it would help if you could tell me what you did to the RAW file, and with what software, please?

Mike

Ian

This is from approximately the same place on Jimmy's chart in the ISO 3200 raw file. FWIW, it's not exactly the same shape as the ISO 100's dot


ISO 3200 raw, 16x

That having been said, I looked at the .RW2 with Picasa up to 400x and saw no green dot in the ISO 100 raw.

I then looked with Raw Therapee and saw no green dot with any of the available demosaicing methods (I unchecked the "remove hot pixels" box.

Looking at the ISO 100 JPG, I don't see any hot pixels but I don't know if that's because Panasonic keeps a record of them internally and doesn't pass them thru to the JPG or whether Panasonic's demosaic algorithm simply doesn't pick up the green pixel.

The JPG I create in PN certainly has them.

How's that for "I don't know the answer"? Might send the .RW2 off to PictureCode to see if they have a comment.

I did process the 100 ISO raw to JPG. In the Exposure panel, I increased detail to 33, which increased the contrast of the bars without doing damage to the resolution as viewed at 300%

I left the sharpening at default.

For noise reduction, I took smoothing and residual noise recovery to zero, and then move the smoothing control to the point where the noise seemed ok (5, much lower than the original value). I increased residual noise to the point where things started to crap up between the sets of bars (13).







--
Sherm

Mikedigi said:

gardenersassistant said:

. . . . I mentioned in a reply to you in Part II of this thread that Lightroom restricts you to "sensible" options. That is the case with the colours. It only allows a limited range of hue adjustment and so I couldn't reproduce Sherm's result with the egret. As with some other things (like precisely controlled and/or complicated cloning for example), you need to use another product when you want to go beyond what Lightroom regards as sensible/useful.

Click to expand...

PS to my first reply to this paragraph - perhaps it would help if you could tell me what you did to the RAW file, and with what software, please?

Mike

Click to expand...

Here we go Mike. A video for you.
Probably best to click on YouTube at the bottom right to watch it at YouTube. That way you can make it bigger and you'll be able to see the sliders better.

--
Nick
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gardenersassistant/collections/
https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/t...-dslr-primes-a-journey-of-exploration.531050/

Hi Sherm,

Thanks for your detailed (excuse pun!) reply about the pixel-level coloured spots.

After some searching I found this link on PhotographyLife which I think might give the answer: https://photographylife.com/dead-vs-stuck-vs-hot-pixels

It says there : “If you have a colored pixel (actually a small cross when viewed closely) that always shows up in the same spot, you have a stuck pixel. It is normal for digital camera sensors and LCDs to have multiple stuck pixels.”

Then I found this link here which says, under the heading “Switch to RAW”: “Shoot your photos in RAW format. When it comes time to process the photos just use a RAW processing tool like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, or RawTherapee as these tools will interact with the RAW format provided by your camera (and the embedded pixel information) and actively map out the hot pixels. “

So it seems that Photo Ninja, at least it’s when tricked into running a TZ80 RAW file as a TZ60 file, doesn’t map out the stuck pixels, but RawTherapee does.

I’m not sure if all of that is correct, so hopefully someone else might chime in and help with advice about stuck pixels (if that's what they are).

Thanks for your rendition of the 100 ISO file, and for giving the settings you used. That’s very helpful. Looking at your version when enlarged, I think I can see some partially resolved triplet lines on lower rows on the resolution chart than in my version.

Ian

--
Ianperegian
http://www.ianperegian.com/

Mikedigi said:

Sherm, thanks for starting Part 3 of the thread.

Re your sky, this is all under "Color Enhancement" I think?

So do you think that this is applicable to recovering just the worst bits of the highlights in my last church shot, without affecting anything else?

Click to expand...

I think I am somewhat responsible for leading you to believe that hue adjustments are needed to effectively bring down the highlights, and that some complex workflow is always required regardless. But that is far from the case. What I was really trying to illustrate was how much freedom you have to tweak things in a multitude of directions.

Like most good converters, Photo Ninja assumes a sort of "idiot mode" by default, whereby it makes a bunch of intelligent decisions automatically based on an analysis of the image. So far as that relates to exposure specifically, the "Smart Lighting" feature will be active. Here's what the in-line help popup (available throughout the program) says about it:

"In Smart lighting mode, the Exposure Offset, Highlights, and Illumination sliders are automatically adjusted to better preserve highlights by compressing contrast and dynamic range if necessary. This mode attempts to identify very bright specular reflections and light sources and will compress or sacrifice them to allocate more dynamic range to the rest of the image. On low-contrast images there is usually little or no difference compared to "As Shot" mode. On high-contrast images, shadows will typically be opened up and highlights compressed, smoothing out harsh lighting."

And here's what "idiot mode" (not that you are one -- this is really about convenience and simplicity obviously) looks like:



The only manual change I made was to enable automatic correction of chromatic aberration, and all that entailed was putting a single tick in a single box. No hue adjustments; no other adjustments (no luminance noise reduction either, but that's a single-click sort of affair as well if you're happy with the defaults).

From here you can make some small (or large) changes as you see fit (colour, contrast, luma NR, sharpening etc). Or not. You may just want to choose from a bunch of available presets (different portrait/scenic modes etc). And you can of course modify the default profile to your personal tastes. Or not.

For the record I am not trying to talk you into going with Photo Ninja instead of Lightroom. Lightroom may in fact be the better choice for you. I'm just trying to share some information and perspective (and correct some misapprehensions I might be responsible for creating of course).

Ian,

Thank you for the interesting information. I now understand the rationale for Raw Therapee's checkboxes for dark and hot pixels - It can reference the information because it's in the .rw2.

I did uncheck the "hot pixels" checkbox, but can't tell you for sure that it accomplished anything ;-)

sherman_levine said:

Here's the same image, but with a bit more tuning of the exposure sliders, aimed at brightening the dark areas without doing too much damage to the recovered highlights. Nothing related to colors.

Click to expand...

Thanks very much Sherm, I can see how these exposure adjustments have worked, while keeping the flowers and faces. I'll have a go with my Photo Ninja demo version.

Incidentally, in the SOOC JPEG, I was surprised by how well Venus had handled the 800 ISO noise, with NR -2, Sharpness -1.

Mike

cainn24 said:

cainn24 said:

I think I am somewhat responsible for leading you to believe that hue adjustments are needed to effectively bring down the highlights . . . . . . .

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Not your fault, I get confused very easily !

I've glanced though this post and it looks very encouraging.

Many thanks, I'll study it in detail later today. I am under a bit of pressure to do something "useful" right now.

Mike

If you ever get the opportunity to use Raw Therapee, take a look at the demosaicing panel. You can choose among several algorithms, including None.

None is the RGB Bayer array without processing. Worth a look

sherman_levine said:

If you ever get the opportunity to use Raw Therapee, take a look at the demosaicing panel. You can choose among several algorithms, including None.

None is the RGB Bayer array without processing. Worth a look

Click to expand...

Thanks Sherm, that does sound interesting and I will try it. I did look at RawTherapee briefly quite a long time ago and I recall that while it seemed very powerful it also seemed rather daunting. PN by contrast seems a breeze to use.

Ian

Since there is a bit of RT discussion going on in this thread I thought I might as well throw a RT render into the mix as well:



So we can do it for free too

(as others have mentioned though RawTherapee is a bit scary in terms of the sheer amount of complex functionality it offers, and you sort of have to coax it into producing decent results sometimes)

Ianperegian said:

... or RawTherapee as these tools will interact with the RAW format provided by your camera (and the embedded pixel information) and actively map out the hot pixels. “
So it seems that Photo Ninja, at least it’s when tricked into running a TZ80 RAW file as a TZ60 file, doesn’t map out the stuck pixels, but RawTherapee does.

I’m not sure if all of that is correct, so hopefully someone else might chime in and help with advice about stuck pixels (if that's what they are).

Click to expand...

To remove stuck pixels with RawTherapee, the preferred way is to create a .badpixels file. Howto is here in the 'Bad Pixels' section. You only have to do it once correctly and then RawTherapee will automatically interpolate these stuck pixels from neighbouring pixels which are not stuck when you open a raw file of the correspondig camera.

The Hot Pixel and Dead Pixel Filter in Prepocessing area of RawTherapee is designed to remove Hot or Dead pixels which appear when shooting with long exposure time, where the Hot and Dead pixels don't appear at the same coordinates each time. RawTherapee analyzes the raw sensor data to find this pixels. This can lead to false positives (that's the reason for the Threshold slider in Hot Dead Pixel Filter) and though it is quite fast it still needs more processing time than reading the coordinates from the .badpixels file.

Ingo

I forgot to mention one thing in last reply. There are some cameras which are known to mark bad pixels as zero (some Panasonic cameras, maybe Leica too). For this cameras RawTherapee automatically corrects the bad pixels by interpolation from neighbouring pixels without need to create a .badpixels file.

Ingo

gardenersassistant said:

Mikedigi said:

gardenersassistant said:

. . . . I mentioned in a reply to you in Part II of this thread that Lightroom restricts you to "sensible" options. That is the case with the colours. It only allows a limited range of hue adjustment and so I couldn't reproduce Sherm's result with the egret. As with some other things (like precisely controlled and/or complicated cloning for example), you need to use another product when you want to go beyond what Lightroom regards as sensible/useful.

Click to expand...

PS to my first reply to this paragraph - perhaps it would help if you could tell me what you did to the RAW file, and with what software, please?

Mike

Click to expand...

Here we go Mike. A video for you.

Probably best to click on YouTube at the bottom right to watch it at YouTube. That way you can make it bigger and you'll be able to see the sliders better.

Click to expand...

In the allmost 10 years I´ve been reading here this must be the most straightforward reply to an individual question I´ve seen!

A personal online video-tutorial !

Wow!

You are REALLY smart!

kohinoor said:

gardenersassistant said:

Mikedigi said:

gardenersassistant said:

. . . . I mentioned in a reply to you in Part II of this thread that Lightroom restricts you to "sensible" options. That is the case with the colours. It only allows a limited range of hue adjustment and so I couldn't reproduce Sherm's result with the egret. As with some other things (like precisely controlled and/or complicated cloning for example), you need to use another product when you want to go beyond what Lightroom regards as sensible/useful.

Click to expand...

PS to my first reply to this paragraph - perhaps it would help if you could tell me what you did to the RAW file, and with what software, please?

Mike

Click to expand...

Here we go Mike. A video for you.

Probably best to click on YouTube at the bottom right to watch it at YouTube. That way you can make it bigger and you'll be able to see the sliders better.

Click to expand...

In the allmost 10 years I´ve been reading here this must be the most straightforward reply to an individual question I´ve seen!

A personal online video-tutorial !

Wow!

You are REALLY smart!

Click to expand...

[Blush!] Thank you.

gardenersassistant said:

Here we go Mike. A video for you.

Probably best to click on YouTube at the bottom right to watch it at YouTube. That way you can make it bigger and you'll be able to see the sliders better.

Click to expand...

Thanks very much Nick, I regret that I was unable to watch it today, we are in the middle of arrangements for a family funeral.

Mike

gardenersassistant said:

. . . . Mike, here's another example of altering the characteristics of a limited range of colour, this one using Lightroom. . . . . . . . . . .

Click to expand...

gardenersassistant said:

. . . . I mentioned in a reply to you in Part II of this thread that Lightroom restricts you to "sensible" options. That is the case with the colours. It only allows a limited range of hue adjustment and so I couldn't reproduce Sherm's result with the egret. As with some other things (like precisely controlled and/or complicated cloning for example), you need to use another product when you want to go beyond what Lightroom regards as sensible/useful.

Click to expand...

Thanks Nick, it's been an amazing thread for learning something about the various different RAW developers.

Mike

Mikedigi said:

Thanks very much Nick, I regret that I was unable to watch it today, we are in the middle of arrangements for a family funeral.

Mike

Click to expand...

Sorry to hear that