First nine days with R6II

Canon_Guy wrote:

Alastair Norcross wrote:

Canon_Guy wrote:

Alastair Norcross wrote:

Canon_Guy wrote:

Congrats to a new camera.

There seem to be quite a learning curve of working with R6II files. Please do not take it personally, I only write it openly.

That's fine. Feedback is always appreciated, even when not agreed with.

Colors of the first photo are scary

I did wonder whether to adjust the white balance for this one, but that is how it looked in the restaurant. This one (also in my OP) was taken at the same time, but facing the other way (the woman was the one who took the one of us):

The lighting facing us was different. Here is the version of us, taking the white balance off the white lettering on my shirt:

And here's one taking the white balance off the mat:

I agree that both are less 'scary' than the first version I posted, but they are also less like what the lighting actually looked like facing us. On balance, I prefer the look of the first of these two reprocessed ones, though, so thanks for prompting me to make the change.

I think it is not so much about the wrong WB. In situations like that with the strong natural light coming from the left side and the artificial light from probably bulbs there is no right way how to setup the WB. You set it up for the light from outdoor and the rest is hell orange. You set it up for bulbs and the rest is hell blue. Usually something in between with rather decreased oranges (a bit!) and overall saturation works the best.

The major problem with colors on this photo is way extreme darkening of highlights, very decreased contrast and perhaps some kind of a HDR filter applied. All of them crushed natural balance between what should be really light and what should be darker - natural gradations.

It is most obvious on the flower at the top left corner. Parts of its leaves which are lit directly should be very bright. And you made them dark greyish...

The same applies to the lady's cheek. Way too darkened out of proportions with the rest.

Overall the picture seems to be kind of greyish and foggy. In the real it must have been very contrasty, colorful and vibrant thanks to the strong light from outside.

It is very hard to work on the JPG with all the lost highlighs (which are the biggest issue here) and drastically reduced color ranges but adjustments going this direction makes the photo less foggy and scary to me :

Hmm. I like the faces here, but the rest now looks wrong.

Sure. Because --- read above --- "It is very hard to work on the JPG with all the lost highlighs (which are the biggest issue here) and drastically reduced color ranges"

and majority of pictures are way oversharpened (glowing halos around edges, washed out colors on edges).

Now this I don't see at all (except maybe a little in the last shot). Sharpening halos are caused by USM sharpening,

Only when done improperly.

Yes, of course.

Otherwise no halos with USM. It is all about the right balance of its sliders. And also (with less sharp lenses which might not be your case) about understanding that when the picture simply is not sharp from the camera/lens combo, you never get that sharpness in.

which DXO doesn't use (at least I don't use it with DXO). All these just use the standard DXO lens corrections, which incorporates their own sharpening (not USM, which they include as an option if you want to use it). I don't add anything to that.

Yes, these were my finding from couple of months of using the DxO. That its way of standard processing is too processed, looking unnatural.

Well, that's certainly a matter of taste. I find the results from DXO to look far more natural than other processors I've used.

Pity not shown here.

As on the lady's hair on top of hear head on the above picture. No halos there but the level of cogged stairs like diagonal lines is just too much. Hair don't look like that.

Same applies to the cat's whiskers.

I'm afraid I'm not seeing any of this.

Really :-)? Honestly I've never seen hair like this. You did :-)?

(enlarged to 400% to avoid blurring the stairs by your monitor)

It doesn't show up at 100% on my monitor, at least not from the viewing distance I intend.

Same plus the halo I mentioned applies to the writing (I did enlarge it to 200% but it is very obvious and distractive even at 100%):

Now this must be down to monitor differences. I see just the level of pixellation that you expect at 200%. At 100% I don't see anything.

Your monitor really does not show the clear white glow around the black lines on the below picture when viewed at 100%?

Not from a normal viewing distance, no (I don't view my screen from closer than about 18 inches).

Or the branches on the last picture? If not, than it explains the whole issue here.

In that case your monitor somehow blurs fine details. That explains why all the samples here are oversharpened as you try to suppress the lack of actual monitor sharpness by sharpening the image.

The same oversharpened artifacts acompany all the shots. The tree bark, the squirrel fur... Way too much micro contrast, my eyes hurt while looking at it. It would look much more natural if the same way of sharpenng was pulled down from 100% to 40-50%.

I've examined all these at 100% on my monitor, and see a lot of detail, but no sharpening artifacts, and no sharpening halos.

Come on....

No, really.

Now I see, we have the explanation above.

I think what you're seeing is the very good amount of detail that's possible with the R6II and DXO. Coming from different combinations, it can be easy to see actual good sharpness as oversharpening. A couple of the shots have a bit of glow on some edges, but not on the plane of focus, so not caused by sharpening. What you're probably seeing there is a bit of LOCA.

The last one shows it the most evidently.

Yes, this one might need a bit of toning down. Although DXO is an excellent processor,

I am not convinced at all neither from my own experience neither from you examples.

Well, some people just don't like DXO. It's all a matter of personal taste.

one thing it doesn't do as well as Lightroom is show you exactly how an image will look before you process it (because the processing takes a lot of power). You can only see small previews of bits of the image with all the settings applied. I adjusted a couple of settings on this one (turned down the smart lighting from medium to slight, turned down the clear view (PL's version of LR's dehaze) a bit, and turned down the microcontrast (PL's version of LR's clarity) a bit too). This is what it looks like now:

Compared with the earlier version:

I'm actually not sure which of these I like better. It's up to individual taste, but thanks for pushing me to at least try it differently.

Or is it the DxO what performs that badly? Also the HDR on the last picture is patchy in the sky and trees and poorly handled

I think what you're actually seeing here is the patchy clouds in the sky. Notice the difference between the trees closer to the sun, and the ones on the left near the top. The top left corner was the only part of the sky with no wispy clouds in it at that time.

Well I mainly mean the halos around branches where the blue is lighter at some distance exactly around the shape of branches. And also of course the strong white glow at the edges of branches.

- most probably it is the DxO thing too.

Looking on the DPR's samples gallery I am sure R6II can deliver WAY better results. It is just about a good SW and its correct using. Which can be learned at the end quite easily.

Thanks for the feedback, even though I disagree with most of it. It's also possible, of course, that the images look different on different monitors.

This might be part of the issue. Many people do not have properly hardware calibrated monitors with the correct white point value.

Also many monitors suffer from lack of the microcontrast between individual pixels or are just blurry.

Also there still is terrible amount of TN panel monitors which are completely unusable for any photo work.

I do not think these might be your case - I suppose you have an up to date monitor corresponding to your photo gear.

I've had the experience before of one or two people saying my images looked oversharpened, and others saying they didn't. So it could be a difference in viewing medium. A lot of it is also down to individual taste. I've been processing digital images for over twenty years, with Photoshop and Lightroom, and DXO. My tastes change a bit, but I've got my DXO settings to where they mostly give me the results I like. I know what oversharpening, for my taste, looks like, and I know what detail extraction looks like. I'm happy with the detail that DXO gives me.

Of course that colors and sharpness are strngy the matter of the individual taste. But these glowing edges or edgy stairs like diagonals are just wrong objectively. Things don't look like that.

Well, they don't look like that to me either on these images. Another possibility is that whatever DPR uses to host images is doing something.

Impossible. If it was true, all pictures from all posters would look like this. But they don't.

I appreciate the time you've put into it, and I understand your preferences here (though I don't share most of them). But I'm rather puzzled by some of what you're saying, because the images simply don't show those features on my monitors (all iMacs).

Yes, that is pretty much possible.

There are certainly differences between how they look hosted on DPR and how they look when viewing with something like Preview on my Macs, but I'm not seeing the diagonal effect you describe in either place. The hair and whiskers, for example, all look completely natural to me.

Don't you have any kind of up/downscaling, smoothing, read assistence or whatever turned on on your graphic card? Or any other "graphics enhancements" turned on?

I don't think so, unless the iMac turns it on by default. I've always liked the way the retina monitors on my iMacs look, and haven't messed with them. I've just checked the system settings and don't see anything about smoothing adjustments. You can adjust the scaling, but I leave it on the default for the iMac display. The adjustment just seems to make text and images bigger or smaller. If you're seeing stair-stepping at 100% view, your scaling is probably producing bigger images than mine. Just to check, when you look at a 2000 pixel wide image at 100%, how wide is that on your monitor (cm or inches)?

Cause it is obvious now that what you see on your monitors is not as sharp as it should be. So you oversharpen the image to look good on your monitor. But when viewed on proper monitor (Eizo CG on my side) it shows the real state.

If you have nearby any graphic studio or photo gear shop with quality HW calibrated monitors, try to take you photos on a USB stick and have a look at them there.

I could do that. But you seem to be making the assumption that how things look on your monitor is how they are 'supposed' to look. I process my pictures to look like I want them to look on the medium I use. Most of the people I show them to seem to have similar hardware to me, and like how they look on that. It's possible that they would look quite different to me on your hardware. But then, if I processed them to look like how I want them to look on that hardware, they might look worse on other people's. Imagine that you always print on high gloss paper, and I always print on Photo Rag. It's quite possible that a file of mine that looks good printed on Photo Rag would look less good printed on high gloss, or vice versa.

I'm open to suggestions, but I'm reluctant to make changes based on how my images look on equipment that most people don't have. As all the tutorials point out, digital sharpening should be tailored to the output medium (so usually different for prints versus monitor viewing, for example). Of course, it might be that most people have hardware like yours, and are just being polite when they say that my images look good. I'll try to look at some of my images on someone else's monitor, to see whether I see a difference.