For those of You who Have a *st

For those of you who have the camera already in hand, could you tell us what seetings you are using on the camera for sharpness, exposure, and color. Thanks Roman

Roman said:

For those of you who have the camera already in hand, could you
tell us what seetings you are using on the camera for sharpness,
exposure, and color. Thanks Roman

Click to expand...

I am mostly using the default setting for sharpness and saturation, although I shot a few landscapes at the saturated setting. I vary exposure depending on the scene.

alex

I prefer to shoot in RAW format as it allows me to choose most important settings during the conversion phase on my PC: exposure compensation, white balance, tone curve, contrast, color saturation and sharpness. If I don't like the result from certain setting combinations, I can change them and convert again. If you shoot in JPEG there's no way to reverse these settings once the image gets saved in the camera.

Also third party RAW converters in the future might prove to perform even better than the Pentax-supplied programs. I've already found one Japanese program that supports *ist D RAW format. I hope that the other two major commercial programs, Capture One DSLR LE and Adobe's Camera RAW, can be updated to include *ist D support.

Best,

Peter

I prefer the default settings as well. I noticed when shooting in the higher contrast and sat modes some artifacting, especially in the blacks. Off course you dont notice this unless your magnified by 200% or more, but it still bothers me. I do hope that I can get my hands on some better RAW conversion software because the difference between High JPEG and RAW is quite noticeable in my opinion.

I use sharpness +1, saturation +1 and default for contrast. Works for me.
Efraim

Roman said:

For those of you who have the camera already in hand, could you
tell us what seetings you are using on the camera for sharpness,
exposure, and color. Thanks Roman

Click to expand...

Pete Fang said:

I prefer to shoot in RAW format as it allows me to choose most
important settings during the conversion phase on my PC: exposure
compensation, white balance, tone curve, contrast, color saturation
and sharpness. If I don't like the result from certain setting
combinations, I can change them and convert again. If you shoot in
JPEG there's no way to reverse these settings once the image gets
saved in the camera.

Click to expand...

I expect to switch to the RAW format at some point, but I'm hoping that Pentax can release a firmware which does a better job of compressing the RAW images. 34 RAW files per 512mb card isn't much fun.

I was also going to wait and see what other RAW software came out since it sounded like the Pentax software was pretty pathetic (I haven't tried using it yet).

alex

Has the exposure worked well for you without any compensation?
Thanks Roman

Roman said:

Has the exposure worked well for you without any compensation?

Click to expand...

It has produced pretty well exposed images in auto. As with any camera there are scenes that the matrix metering doesn't quite understand and so it will get the exposure a little wrong.

This image has no exposure compensation:
http://phred.org/~alex/pictures/hiking/snow-lake-10-5-03/reduced/IMGP1428.JPG

This image has -0.5 exposure compensation to avoid blowing out the sky:



The camera probably wanted to increase the exposure to avoid underexposing the branches in the upper right. I was just using those to frame the shot, so the exposure of the sky was more important to me.

This image has no exposure compensation:



-0.5 might have helped here though, the sky is blown out. On the other hand everything else is well exposed and the photograph would probably benefit from just cropping the sky out entirely. I wonder how this would have looked with a lower contrast setting (I should have shot it in RAW).

I've been shooting with digital cameras or slide film for the past 6 or 7 years so I'm pretty used to having exposure be pretty critical. Print film has a lot of latitude and is pretty forgiving of incorrect exposure. Slide film and digital sensors aren't as forgiving.

Roman said:

For those of you who have the camera already in hand, could you
tell us what seetings you are using on the camera for sharpness,
exposure, and color. Thanks Roman

Click to expand...

for sat, i'll use default/high for sunny day, and low in night sence. but becarefully if your picture has a totally RED object, high sat will give it a very plastic feel.

i've tried to set the sharpness level to high, and after some usm process in PS, hot pixels become very visible. so i prefer using default sharpness so u can do a better job with PS.

for contrast, just leave it. it is useless. I just wonder if it will works better for a foggie day, but i have no chance to test it out so far.

mr.logo said:

i've tried to set the sharpness level to high, and after some usm
process in PS, hot pixels become very visible. so i prefer using
default sharpness so u can do a better job with PS.

Click to expand...

If your camera has hot pixels which are showing up obviously in normal images then you should exchange it for another one. My first *ist D had this problem but the replacement has a much less noisy sensor.

alex

the hot pixels picture was made with F32, 40s exposure time with NR. I bet it is normal. All the hot one were not noticeable unless I do a usm with PS.

it is a great dslr, i love it

alex wetmore said:

mr.logo said:

i've tried to set the sharpness level to high, and after some usm
process in PS, hot pixels become very visible. so i prefer using
default sharpness so u can do a better job with PS.

Click to expand...

If your camera has hot pixels which are showing up obviously in
normal images then you should exchange it for another one. My
first *ist D had this problem but the replacement has a much less
noisy sensor.

alex

Click to expand...

mr.logo said:

the hot pixels picture was made with F32, 40s exposure time with
NR. I bet it is normal. All the hot one were not noticeable unless
I do a usm with PS.

Click to expand...

Ah, okay. I was getting noticable hot pixels in 1/30" exposures which clearly isn't normal behavior.

I would clean up the hot pixels before doing a USM.

Sounds like you are shooting astrophotography, do you have any samples?

alex

alex wetmore said:

I expect to switch to the RAW format at some point, but I'm hoping
that Pentax can release a firmware which does a better job of
compressing the RAW images. 34 RAW files per 512mb card isn't much
fun.

Click to expand...

I highly doubt that a firmware update could add compression to RAW formats because near-real-time lossless compression in the camera requires lots of hardware processing power. If the *ist D doesn't have any extra juice in its processor for this kind of operation there's simply nothing they can do about it. Using software compression (maybe as a custom function that can be enabled or disabled?) will probably make it to take forever to save a single RAW image. Of course I hate it when my 1GB CF card can only hold 70 RAW files but with all the benefit RAW provides I'll live with that. I have a 20GB portable storage device that I can dump the files to once the CF card gets filled so it's not that bad when I am out shooting long sessions.

alex wetmore said:

I was also going to wait and see what other RAW software came out
since it sounded like the Pentax software was pretty pathetic (I
haven't tried using it yet).

Click to expand...

The Pentax RAW software works alright for me. Two major complaints I have: 1) no 100% preview, showing the preview picture only in a small window; 2) I can't find an option to rotate the picture before the conversion. Other than this, I found that I like it better than the Canon RAW converter that came with my Canon G3. Give RAW a try and I am afraid you might not want to go back.

Best,

Peter

Pete Fang said:

alex wetmore said:

I expect to switch to the RAW format at some point, but I'm hoping
that Pentax can release a firmware which does a better job of
compressing the RAW images. 34 RAW files per 512mb card isn't much
fun.

Click to expand...

I highly doubt that a firmware update could add compression to RAW
formats because near-real-time lossless compression in the camera
requires lots of hardware processing power.

Click to expand...

Saving 12 bits instead of 16 bits requires little extra hardware processing power and would make the files 25% smaller. It is just a matter of saving 4 pixels of data into 3 16 bit words instead of 4 16 bit words.

Pete Fang said:

If the *ist D doesn't
have any extra juice in its processor for this kind of operation
there's simply nothing they can do about it. Using software
compression (maybe as a custom function that can be enabled or
disabled?) will probably make it to take forever to save a single
RAW image.

Click to expand...

We don't know what the CPU is in the *ist D either. It might have the power to do greater compression, but just not wasting 25% of the space would make me happy. It is likely that the speed of the CF card is the bottleneck and that writing smaller compressed files would be faster, not slower.

alex