Jx9 wrote:
Interesting that you only use JPEGs. Is it to maintain Canon colors while still using Lightroom? Do you still fine tune photos in Lightroom?
I've always been a JPEG shooter and this goes back to the times when Canon was only just starting to include RAW on their earlier digital cameras. I've used RAW on rare occasions although I may be tempted to experiment with RAW again on the EOS R6 because I do like what the sensor is capable of resolving.
.
Canon caught my eye when they said that the R6 was going to appeal to people who enjoy shooting in JPEG because that was something I hadn't expected them to draw attention to. It's probably to do with the way the DiGiC X chip processes the images internally. It was a bit hard to rate contrast and Dynamic Range when I was using a CPL filter or shooting with ISO 50. I do still tweak image in Lightroom before resizing in Photoshop... but I did notice that the images needed very little color correction. Only images of white ceramic plates under multiple light sources needed a slight nudge to correct them slightly. I didn't really need to enhance any colors either. I certainly didn't need to apply any sharpening and only one of the images I took was processed later for Noise Reduction... and even then, I had to think about whether or not I even wanted to apply it to that picture. Any noise that showed in higher ISO shots was even and easily removed if you felt a need to do so.
.
With the EOS R6, I felt that my choice of "Fine Detail" in the User Defined Settings produced just the tiniest bit of anti-aliasing with the sharp edges against high contrasting subjects. It wasn't too bold but I noticed it when viewing a couple of image at 100%. An example is the Moon photographed against a blue sky... which has a subtle amount of artifacts from presumably the "sharpening" levels applied by the camera. Since this is adjustable, I will attempt to tweak this setting slightly later today. There is also a "CLARITY" slider below the User Setting. I may drop the "clarity" down one notch to see if this has any notable effect. I would consider these slight artifacts to be fairly normal with edited images or even images downloaded from the camera that have been subjected to in-camera processing. Overall, I thought that the sharpening was just fine. I did note that on the LCD, when zooming into an image during playback, that the anti-aliasing was enhanced and made to look stronger than it was when the image was finally downloaded later. For example, a shot of a crescent moon against the blue sky a couple of days ago looked over-sharpened on the LCD during playback, but was perfectly normal when downloaded. Out of the nearly 1000 photographs I took yesterday, I only adjusted the anti-aliasing on one photograph of the moon (see down below) and one of a bird at sunset. I found this to be more than acceptable. If someone like a journalist was to travel with the R6 to remote or rugged locations, I believe they'd be more than happy with the image quality and camera performance.
.
An example of antialiasing on the curved edge of the moon - which is subtle but correctable (both with camera settings for sharpening and with PP software like Photoshop).
.
Many years ago, JPEGs were quite primitive and a lot of the useful data was baked out of the files. In more recent years (the last decade), more and more professional photographers have been choosing JPEG over RAW simply because the cameras were producing good results with their processing engines. There's still some very useful applications for RAW files although the JPEGs from modern cameras still include enough data for recovering details lost in highlights or lifting details from shadows. People shooting RAW all the time might not be aware of this.
.
The EOS R6 also has the ability to capture files in HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format) instead of JPEG. This is quite interesting because it will allow for images more suitable for display on HDR monitors and televisions. HEIF files are said to be more compressed than JPEG but "open faster" and can contain even more useful data. The Canon EOS 1DX III was the first Canon camera to introduce HEIF files in the Canon family and the R6 uses the same sensor (with a different anti-aliasing filter). Since HEIF contains 16-bit data (instead of 8-bit), there's a lot of room for editing if you're destination is a HDR device. I'll get around to playing with HEIF files later. None of the mainstream web-browsers offer native support for HEIF files (at this stage). They will also convert HEIF to JPEG in many instances when uploading. But it's very interesting to have this technology on the R6.
.
A 100% crop of the moon from yesterday. The high contrast edge was edited very slightly to reduce the anti-aliasing that was visible when enlarged.
.
Going back over the images I took yesterday, I think that the results were more than pleasing to my eyes. I still have to spend more time with the camera before writing a "user/owner review" on it. But so far it's demonstrating appealing results. I was also expecting the camera to heat up during use but that didn't seem to happen at all.
--
Regards,
Marco Nero.
