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CP 990 settings

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Otto,
Otto #32066 said:
I also tried with contrast minus or lighten to adjust the gamma
curve before the JPEG compression. For outdoor images my results
where not very good. There is a colorshift to more blue, which has
to be compesated in a image editing tool. The details in the
shadows and in the light are a bit better, but not much.
Click to expand...
Fred and Ben seem to agree "- contrast" helps to reduce grain.
What about that color shift you're talking about? Did you notice
it can be caused by "- contrast" setting or "lighten" setting?

Thanks

Andrew
 
Fred and All,

The shots of my four year old are done in my bedroom, not a studio. I use a black fabric (purchased at Walmart)for background. The main flash is an sb-28 shot thru a litedome softbox connected via cord to the 990. A second flash, sb-26, is shot into a white unbrella using slave mode. I've tried printing some of the samples I've shot with the contrast- setting. Noise is much better, but I can not get rid of sheen quality to the skin tones. Its as if the 990 has trouble with the extra ev+1 exposure I'm compensating for the contrast. I need to do some more experimenting. I'll let you know if I get any definative findings. I can see how this would not be a problem with landscapes.

Thanks
FRED said:
It's amazing the difference in the amount of noise.
I will definitely be shooting "ISO 50" for outdoor shots, specially
if a blue sky is present. If enough light is available I will not
adjust the EV and then fix the contrast in Photoshop.

Thanks for the samples.
By the way, are those shots from a studio or did you use slave
flashes to get that nice picture?

FRED
Ben Patrick said:
I've added a "contrast -" shot to the low key samples. Although,
the original is a little flat, it is easily adjusted in PhotoShop
levels. This is probably the most natural and definitely has the
least noise in the shadows.
Thanks Fred for the suggestion.

http://members4.clubphoto.com/ben284035/Low_Key_Samples/
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Andrew said:
andrew_ said:
http://www.thongfoto.com/tomokochan.html

This shot was taken 3 meters from the model w/ the main light at
camera right in .tiff mode. The hair light is on a boom behind the
background directly behind model's head and a fill edge light to
camera left. I usually leave the white balance on Auto and Image
adjustment to Lighten for people shots. Image sharpening is set at
normal so that it doesn't amplify excess noise.
Click to expand...
What about trying sharpening off or low. Your picture is great, but
seems a bit too sharp. Unless this is a result of some post process
(PS sharpening). You could also try Fred's "- contrast" setting.
(Thanks Fred and Ben).
Click to expand...
The sharpening was done in PS. I always use Unsharp mask in post process. Even w/ Image Sharpening at normal, my originals appear soft once transfered into the computer. I have 4- CP990 and they all do this(maybe I'm used to the sharpness of film). Studio shots have clean light so that you don't have to worry about excessive noise.

Sharpening is always the final step prior to saving files from PS manipulations to clean up artifacts that PS produces.

I have used the contrast settings outdoors, it works very well.
andrew_ said:
andrew_ said:
I use the Maha(1600ma) rechargeable batteries w/ a rapid charger
and a Powerex Powerbank MH-DPB180M battery pack. This pack is
about the size of a pager and lasts all day(w the LCD on!). I also
love Nikon's WCE-63 wide angle lens.
Click to expand...
I agree, MAHA is great. I tried those Sanyo ones (with no label), but
returned them and bought MAHA new Powerex. How about the cable
between your battery pack and CP990? Is it anoying?
Click to expand...
The cable is coiled so it doesn't dangle. It fits flush w/ the front of the CP so you don't realize it's there. The camera feels very light when using this pack(must remove AA batteries). I only had a problem w/ the adapter tip slipping off occasionally which was remedied by using duck tape around the joint(the company sent an immediate replacement w/ no problem... but I still tape it for insurance).

Once you try it, you'll never pack a ton of AAs on your trips. I got mine from Thomas Distributing.
http://www.thomas-distributing.com/maha-powerbank.htm
andrew_ said:
...
andrew_ said:
I output my images on an Epson photo printer using Epson film paper.
Click to expand...
Epson is just rerealising a new improved version of the premium
glossy.
They admitted to have some problems with their first "improved" bunch
introduced a couple of months ago. I'm not sure if this can help
1270 owners
only (like myself) or other Epson printers too. I'm still amazed by
the
1270 print quality and never had any orange shift problem.

Thanks again for your tips.

Andrew
Click to expand...
Epson's great! Do you use the postcript software? It adds more accuracy to your outputs.

Happy Holidays!

Thong
http://www.thongfoto.com
 
Andrew said:
andrew_ said:
I also tried with contrast minus or lighten to adjust the gamma
curve before the JPEG compression. For outdoor images my results
where not very good. There is a colorshift to more blue, which has
to be compesated in a image editing tool. The details in the
shadows and in the light are a bit better, but not much.
Click to expand...
Fred and Ben seem to agree "- contrast" helps to reduce grain.
What about that color shift you're talking about? Did you notice
it can be caused by "- contrast" setting or "lighten" setting?

Thanks

Andrew
Click to expand...
Andrew,

Excuse my English!

Although the 990 seems to me the best camera in this priceclass, it has still two weeknesses

1st the dynamic range because of the A/D conversion
2nd the signal to noise ratio, because of the relatively small sensor

Both depend directly to the sensor system and the accompanied A/D conversion. There is no trick to get around the physics!

All what we can do is play with
  • linear gain, with ISO 100, 200, 400. This is easy - the gain should be as low as possible.
  • nonlinear gain curves (contrast and lighten). Generally this curves cannot expand the dynamic range of the sensor and also not the signal to noise ratio of the sensor. If you shoot in Tiff-Mode they do the same as you do in photoshop with gamma and contrast. In JPEG the situation is a bit more difficult. After the A/D conversion JPEG brings another quantisation error, which has again an effect on the signal to noise ration. In my testshots outdoors, I couldn't find a difference in the noise if I go for -contrast or -lighten, when I adjust the Images so that all pictures have the same overall brightness with exposure compensation.
  • What is more critical is the sharpness. In good ligths I recommend to use low sharpening, so that JPEG does not destroy little things. In bad light I put sharpening off. With off-sharpening I am able to remove the noise with noise filters on the PC.
Now to my testshots

Because I am a landscape photographer, I make my testshots outdoors. There I found the most critical situations, when the picture has areas with much light and many other areas with greys: Foggy Areas, Snow and rock etc.

In this situations setting -contrast or -lighten gave me a clear blue cast in the situations I mentioned before. Unfortenately I dont know why. This is why I normaly dont use these settings.
Otto
 
Ben Patrick said:
Fred and All,

The shots of my four year old are done in my bedroom, not a studio.
I use a black fabric (purchased at Walmart)for background. The main
flash is an sb-28 shot thru a litedome softbox connected via cord
to the 990. A second flash, sb-26, is shot into a white unbrella
using slave mode. I've tried printing some of the samples I've shot
with the contrast- setting. Noise is much better, but I can not get
rid of sheen quality to the skin tones. Its as if the 990 has
trouble with the extra ev+1 exposure I'm compensating for the
contrast.
Click to expand...
Ben,
I did some tests today and I think +0.7 is closer to a correct
exposure while keeping "- contrast" setting. Anyway, I think
a slight overexposure shouldn't change your colors (sheen cast).
If anything, maybe "- contrast" setting could do that. Check out
Otto's post about blue cast.

Well, we need more tests...

Thanks

Andrew
 
Mbrown31615 said:
Epson's great! Do you use the postcript software? It adds more
accuracy to your outputs.

Happy Holidays!
Click to expand...
Thong,
I tested Adobe PressReady on mac and the results are wonderful.
I noticed prints are usually darker though and I'm not familiar with
all the different settings from "press world". Adobe released a 1270
driver, but then killed the product. So it seems quite stupid to buy it.
It looks pretty rough and eats your memory big time (for one of
my 13x19 prints, 80MB file, pressready created almost 1GB of swap!
in addition to 320MB of ram). Do you know any other postscript
software for mac, or maybe you know something about Adobe's plans?

Thanks and Happy Holidays to you too

Andrew
 
Otto,
Thanks for the technical explanation. :))

In theory, it seems that the amplitude of the dynamic range could not be increased because “everything” happens before any firmware algorithms.

But in practice, from my personal tests you would get less noise and more highlight/shadow detail using the -contrast setting. (Not counting it gives us higher shutter speeds)

Then, in Photoshop, you could decide if those highlight and/or shadow details are important to the composition and tweak the tonal range to your preference.

As far as noise, I prefer getting as less noise as I can from the camera. In Photoshop, I would first get rid of the red and blue channel noise and then fix tonal range and color accuracy. Finally I would apply Unsharp Mask only on the lighness channel (Lab color mode).
I've been getting very clean blue sky and people's shots using this technique.

FRED
Otto said:
Andrew said:
Otto #32066 said:
I also tried with contrast minus or lighten to adjust the gamma
curve before the JPEG compression. For outdoor images my results
where not very good. There is a colorshift to more blue, which has
to be compesated in a image editing tool. The details in the
shadows and in the light are a bit better, but not much.
Click to expand...
Fred and Ben seem to agree "- contrast" helps to reduce grain.
What about that color shift you're talking about? Did you notice
it can be caused by "- contrast" setting or "lighten" setting?

Thanks

Andrew
Click to expand...
Andrew,

Excuse my English!
Although the 990 seems to me the best camera in this priceclass, it
has still two weeknesses

1st the dynamic range because of the A/D conversion
2nd the signal to noise ratio, because of the relatively small sensor

Both depend directly to the sensor system and the accompanied A/D
conversion. There is no trick to get around the physics!

All what we can do is play with
  • linear gain, with ISO 100, 200, 400. This is easy - the gain
should be as low as possible.
  • nonlinear gain curves (contrast and lighten). Generally this
curves cannot expand the dynamic range of the sensor and also not
the signal to noise ratio of the sensor. If you shoot in Tiff-Mode
they do the same as you do in photoshop with gamma and contrast. In
JPEG the situation is a bit more difficult. After the A/D
conversion JPEG brings another quantisation error, which has again
an effect on the signal to noise ration. In my testshots outdoors,
I couldn't find a difference in the noise if I go for -contrast or
-lighten, when I adjust the Images so that all pictures have the
same overall brightness with exposure compensation.
  • What is more critical is the sharpness. In good ligths I
recommend to use low sharpening, so that JPEG does not destroy
little things. In bad light I put sharpening off. With
off-sharpening I am able to remove the noise with noise filters on
the PC.

Now to my testshots
Because I am a landscape photographer, I make my testshots
outdoors. There I found the most critical situations, when the
picture has areas with much light and many other areas with greys:
Foggy Areas, Snow and rock etc.
In this situations setting -contrast or -lighten gave me a clear
blue cast in the situations I mentioned before. Unfortenately I
dont know why. This is why I normaly dont use these settings.
Otto
Click to expand...
 
Hi Fred

When I made testshots, I used primariliy grays, because in grays all 3 rgb channels have the same amplitude and you detect a colorshift easily.

The first shots I did was with the kodak graycard. There I used the flash to get a spectrum as in daylight. What I saw, was a shift in the gammacurve, but the gray stood gray.

Then I made shots outdoors especially with various gray cloudes. Because of the small variations of grey you can easily see the noise and also colorshifts.

Outdoors I tried -contrast too and came to a different result as you. The gray stood gray-blue. I have a European camera with FW 1.1.
Perhaps you can try the same shots in cloudy, gray weather.

(P.S. I'm not sure, but it seems in -contrast mode the camera gets the higher resolution in the shadow and in the light by destroying resolution in the midtones. )

Also to me, it is important to have the opportunity of using ICC colormanagement correction. I dont think a standard ICC color profile can be used in -contrast mode.

Your procedure for noise reduction is good, I like that! Also I think in terms of sharpening we agree.

Only this -contrast topic is controversial. ???

Thanks for this good cooperation on this setting topic! It's still very interesting.

Otto
FRED said:
In theory, it seems that the amplitude of the dynamic range could
not be increased because “everything” happens before
any firmware algorithms.
But in practice, from my personal tests you would get less noise
and more highlight/shadow detail using the -contrast setting. (Not
counting it gives us higher shutter speeds)

Then, in Photoshop, you could decide if those highlight and/or
shadow details are important to the composition and tweak the tonal
range to your preference.
As far as noise, I prefer getting as less noise as I can from the
camera. In Photoshop, I would first get rid of the red and blue
channel noise and then fix tonal range and color accuracy. Finally
I would apply Unsharp Mask only on the lighness channel (Lab color
mode).
I've been getting very clean blue sky and people's shots using this
technique.

FRED
Otto said:
Andrew said:
Member said:
I also tried with contrast minus or lighten to adjust the gamma
curve before the JPEG compression. For outdoor images my results
where not very good. There is a colorshift to more blue, which has
to be compesated in a image editing tool. The details in the
shadows and in the light are a bit better, but not much.
Click to expand...
Fred and Ben seem to agree "- contrast" helps to reduce grain.
What about that color shift you're talking about? Did you notice
it can be caused by "- contrast" setting or "lighten" setting?

Thanks

Andrew
Click to expand...
Andrew,

Excuse my English!
Although the 990 seems to me the best camera in this priceclass, it
has still two weeknesses

1st the dynamic range because of the A/D conversion
2nd the signal to noise ratio, because of the relatively small sensor

Both depend directly to the sensor system and the accompanied A/D
conversion. There is no trick to get around the physics!

All what we can do is play with
  • linear gain, with ISO 100, 200, 400. This is easy - the gain
should be as low as possible.
  • nonlinear gain curves (contrast and lighten). Generally this
curves cannot expand the dynamic range of the sensor and also not
the signal to noise ratio of the sensor. If you shoot in Tiff-Mode
they do the same as you do in photoshop with gamma and contrast. In
JPEG the situation is a bit more difficult. After the A/D
conversion JPEG brings another quantisation error, which has again
an effect on the signal to noise ration. In my testshots outdoors,
I couldn't find a difference in the noise if I go for -contrast or
-lighten, when I adjust the Images so that all pictures have the
same overall brightness with exposure compensation.
  • What is more critical is the sharpness. In good ligths I
recommend to use low sharpening, so that JPEG does not destroy
little things. In bad light I put sharpening off. With
off-sharpening I am able to remove the noise with noise filters on
the PC.

Now to my testshots
Because I am a landscape photographer, I make my testshots
outdoors. There I found the most critical situations, when the
picture has areas with much light and many other areas with greys:
Foggy Areas, Snow and rock etc.
In this situations setting -contrast or -lighten gave me a clear
blue cast in the situations I mentioned before. Unfortenately I
dont know why. This is why I normaly dont use these settings.
Otto
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Thank you to Andrew for posing a great question. I've learned a lot from these replys.

Fred, can the -contrast setting be used in sunny and cloudy conditions? If it gives you higher shutter speeds wouldn't this be a problem in bright conditions?

Would you also explain how you remove the red and blue channel noise and unsharpen the lightness channel in PS(I have PS.5.5).

Much obliged,
mbrown
FRED said:
In theory, it seems that the amplitude of the dynamic range could
not be increased because “everything” happens before
any firmware algorithms.
But in practice, from my personal tests you would get less noise
and more highlight/shadow detail using the -contrast setting. (Not
counting it gives us higher shutter speeds)

Then, in Photoshop, you could decide if those highlight and/or
shadow details are important to the composition and tweak the tonal
range to your preference.
As far as noise, I prefer getting as less noise as I can from the
camera. In Photoshop, I would first get rid of the red and blue
channel noise and then fix tonal range and color accuracy. Finally
I would apply Unsharp Mask only on the lighness channel (Lab color
mode).
I've been getting very clean blue sky and people's shots using this
technique.

FRED
Otto said:
Andrew said:
Member said:
I also tried with contrast minus or lighten to adjust the gamma
curve before the JPEG compression. For outdoor images my results
where not very good. There is a colorshift to more blue, which has
to be compesated in a image editing tool. The details in the
shadows and in the light are a bit better, but not much.
Click to expand...
Fred and Ben seem to agree "- contrast" helps to reduce grain.
What about that color shift you're talking about? Did you notice
it can be caused by "- contrast" setting or "lighten" setting?

Thanks

Andrew
Click to expand...
Andrew,

Excuse my English!
Although the 990 seems to me the best camera in this priceclass, it
has still two weeknesses

1st the dynamic range because of the A/D conversion
2nd the signal to noise ratio, because of the relatively small sensor

Both depend directly to the sensor system and the accompanied A/D
conversion. There is no trick to get around the physics!

All what we can do is play with
  • linear gain, with ISO 100, 200, 400. This is easy - the gain
should be as low as possible.
  • nonlinear gain curves (contrast and lighten). Generally this
curves cannot expand the dynamic range of the sensor and also not
the signal to noise ratio of the sensor. If you shoot in Tiff-Mode
they do the same as you do in photoshop with gamma and contrast. In
JPEG the situation is a bit more difficult. After the A/D
conversion JPEG brings another quantisation error, which has again
an effect on the signal to noise ration. In my testshots outdoors,
I couldn't find a difference in the noise if I go for -contrast or
-lighten, when I adjust the Images so that all pictures have the
same overall brightness with exposure compensation.
  • What is more critical is the sharpness. In good ligths I
recommend to use low sharpening, so that JPEG does not destroy
little things. In bad light I put sharpening off. With
off-sharpening I am able to remove the noise with noise filters on
the PC.

Now to my testshots
Because I am a landscape photographer, I make my testshots
outdoors. There I found the most critical situations, when the
picture has areas with much light and many other areas with greys:
Foggy Areas, Snow and rock etc.
In this situations setting -contrast or -lighten gave me a clear
blue cast in the situations I mentioned before. Unfortenately I
dont know why. This is why I normaly dont use these settings.
Otto
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
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