First nine days with R6II

[Alastair Norcross]

I got my R6II the Saturday before last (from a Canadian store through Canon Pricewatch), and have been playing with it ever since, whenever I've had some free time (not always a lot). I sold my R to get it. The R was great, and really great value when I got it refurbished for around $1100, but the R6II is better in every way, except sheer number of pixels, and I can't say I've noticed the difference in resolution so far. I know some people say that the R6II gives better sharpness, because of a less aggressive AA filter. I don't really have an opinion on that. The R6II certainly gives really sharp results, but, for all I know, that's because the AF system is even better than the R's. The AF system is nothing short of amazing. It's like my R7, but even better. The auto setting for subject recognition works really well. You don't have to decide whether to prioritize people, animals, or vehicles. On auto, the camera does it for you (but you can also specify one of those three, or none at all). You can also set subject recognition mode to a button, which I have done. It's a shame the R7 can't do that (at least not that I've discovered so far), because it would be even more useful on the R7, which doesn't have the auto select mode.

At first, I was a little disappointed that the R6II doesn't have as many buttons to assign functions to as the R7 (which has a 4-way controller instead of a back wheel, so four more buttons), but I've found that I don't really need a button control for several of the functions I have on the R7. On the R7, I switch manually between screen and EVF with one of the 4-way buttons, turn off the screen with another, brighten the screen with a third, and switch between one shot and servo with the fourth. I have the R6II set to turn off the screen and the EVF after the minimum amount of time, and the auto switching works well enough that I'm using it. I also use one-shot so infrequently that I don't need it assigned to a button. It's one of the options on the dial function settings, which I have assigned to the M-fn button.

This camera is really fast! 40fps in e-shutter is insane. I haven't used that yet. 20fps is already screaming fast. I would like an e-shutter setting between 5 and 20, though. The AF is so good that I have no worries about handing the camera to a friend who only uses a phone, and telling her just to point the camera at me and my wife and press the shutter button. She kept complaining that it looked blurred in the viewfinder, because I think she was too nervous to half-press the shutter. I had the camera set to auto subject recognition and eye detect, with whole area enabled. This is the result (one of four, all of which were equally well focused):




I'm telling her not worry, and just press the shutter button!

So far, I've tried six of my RF lenses on it (16, 35, 50, 85, 24-105, 100-400), and they've all worked perfectly. Here are a few from my first nine days. They're all web-sized at 2000 pixels on the longer side, because this is how I display most of my shots. There are plenty of full resolution samples available on the web.




First shot with the camera (after test shots while setting up various buttons and dials). ISO 25,600!




Obligatory cat shot (of course). One of many.




The other cat (he'd feel left out, if I didn't put one of him here).












In auto subject recognition mode it has no difficulty switching between people and animals




Oy! What are you staring at?








Six different stouts!












IBIS makes 1/10 with the 50 a breeze
















The tiny 16 F2.8 works very well

All in all, I'm very pleased so far. I've shot mostly in e-shutter, and no sign of rolling shutter distortion yet. But most of the things I shoot, even the fast-moving things, don't tend to produce the kind of movement that is affected by rolling shutter. I shot over 3000 pictures in e-shutter with my R7 yesterday, with its much slower e-shutter readout, and had precisely one picture where rolling shutter was noticeable (and even there it didn't at all ruin the shot). That included running dogs, prairie dogs, people, and a couple of flying birds (but not with rapidly beating wings).

I'm still trying to decide whether I really need the R7 and the R6II. It was fun being able to use both on a hike yesterday, with the R7 with 100-400 and 1.4X, and the R6II with 16 (and 50 in the bag). I don't do a lot of distant wildlife, so I might be able to get away with just the R6II, but the R7 is such a fun camera to use too. I'll probably continue to spoil myself (not to mention all my M gear for traveling).

--
“When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror, like the passengers in his car.” Jack Handey
Alastair

anorcross

Keen hobbyist since teaching myself film photography as a teenager in the 70s, using manual SLRs and black and white film. Love photographing people and animals.

anorcross.smugmug.com

Equipment in profile

 

[José B]

Thanks for sharing your experience with the R6MKII. Nice pics and love the colours! Which white balance setting are you using? I set mine to AWB-W and like it so far. I seldom have the need to adjust the white balance on post.

The bokeh of the RF 24-105/4 looks nice as well.

Cheers,

José

 

[Alastair Norcross]

Thanks for sharing your experience with the R6MKII. Nice pics and love the colours! Which white balance setting are you using? I set mine to AWB-W and like it so far. I seldom have the need to adjust the white balance on post.

The bokeh of the RF 24-105/4 looks nice as well.

Cheers,

José

Thanks José. I use AWB-W as well, and rarely adjust in post (sometimes for some indoor shots). I've always liked the 24-105L for portraits. I had the original EF version for many years. It can work very well, depending on the background. You don't always want razor-thin DOF. Even at F4, the DOF can be very shallow, as the shot of my son wearing a mask demonstrates.

 

[gipper51]

Congrats! Looks like you're getting along very nicely with the new camera. It's quite a machine. I really can't find much to criticize with it yet. I do agree, I wish there were more options to set burst speeds in E-shutter. I'll likely never need 40fps either; options of 10 and 15 would be ideal.

I can't imagine myself needing 'more camera' than the R6II for a long time. The camera is so dang smart now, there's not much left for me to do lol. In a decade I can imagine AI in the camera giving suggestions for composition, DOF and other settings, then we just tell the camera "yes please!" and it will adjust accordingly. All we have to do is point where it tells us and it does the rest. The tech really is spoiling us.

 

[JRET]

nice writeup & equally nice images. The R6ii is definitely on my short list for the next upgrade. I'm in no hurry for a final decision but will probably wait for Black Friday/Christmas sales.

 

[MAC]

Congrats Alastair!

Nice pics and I can see how great that AF is -- they say better than R5, better than R6 -- you got great stuff! Can't wait for my puppy R6II, the R8 for me hopefully in April!

 

[KevinRA]

Great stuff Alistair - enjoy!

The only thing I could see the R7 being better for is focal length limited telephoto work - where it tops the R5 let alone the R6 - and is the reason why I have not gone down the R6 road. Until at least Canon ports over the EFM 11-22 and 32 for amazing size and IQ at lower price than FF equiv.

 

[Canon_Guy]

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. Colors of the first photo are scary and majority of pictures are way oversharpened (glowing halos around edges, washed out colors on edges). The last one shows it the most evidently.

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 - 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.

 

[Canon_Guy]

Congrats Alastair!

Nice pics and I can see how great that AF is -- they say better than R5, better than R6 -- you got great stuff! Can't wait for my puppy R6II, the R8 for me hopefully in April!

There is nothing really challenging for the AF system on these pictures. Except the two cyclists all the pictures are static scenes, veeery relaxed even for DSLR's AF. The beard guy on a bike is shot at f/8, the young lady at f/4, so lots of DoF. Both at slow speeds (assuming none of them rode 60+ km/h ).

But it would be interesting to se the direct comparison. Both cameras at the same spot, same fast tele lens, and let us say fast dog running back and worth not far from the busy background (foliage). That might be the situation where some difference between R6's and R6II's AF system could appear.

But I think Alastair hasn't such an option.

 

[Alastair Norcross]

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.

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

- 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. 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.

--
“When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror, like the passengers in his car.” Jack Handey
Alastair

anorcross

Keen hobbyist since teaching myself film photography as a teenager in the 70s, using manual SLRs and black and white film. Love photographing people and animals.

anorcross.smugmug.com

Equipment in profile

 

[R6iiowner]

so far I'm disappointed with the R6ii in low light

 

[Alastair Norcross]

so far I'm disappointed with the R6ii in low light

Really? In what way? I've used 25,600 and it looks great. Are you talking noise? AF speed? Both are great for me. What are you using to process your images?

 

[jumpthesnark]

Congrats on the new camera, and thanks for sharing your initial impressions with us.

What are you using for post processing? I know this is very subjective and largely up to individual taste, but there's a strong HDR type look in a lot of those images, and what looks like over-saturation with the blue (daylight from windows) rimlight on the people sitting at the table indoors. Likewise that last image has a similarly strong (to me) HDR look. I don't see this look in all images, though.

Do you have any unprocessed JPEGs straight from the camera that you're willing to share?

Thanks again, and best of luck with the R6 II!

 

[Alastair Norcross]

Congrats on the new camera, and thanks for sharing your initial impressions with us.

What are you using for post processing? I know this is very subjective and largely up to individual taste, but there's a strong HDR type look in a lot of those images, and what looks like over-saturation with the blue (daylight from windows) rimlight on the people sitting at the table indoors. Likewise that last image has a similarly strong (to me) HDR look. I don't see this look in all images, though.

Do you have any unprocessed JPEGs straight from the camera that you're willing to share?

Thanks again, and best of luck with the R6 II!

I use DXO Photolab. I'm afraid I don't shoot JPEG, so I don't have any OOC JPEGs. I do a bit more highlight and shadow recovery than some people like, and the last one is certainly not to everyone's taste (that's why I posted the alternate version too). Colorado has a lot of blue sky, and colors are certainly different up here from how they are in some other parts. Sometimes people look at blue skies in my shots and think I've overdone it, but that's often the way the skies actually look here.

 

[Canon_Guy]

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 :

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. 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.

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.

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%):



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....

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.

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.

 

[Alastair Norcross]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Look at where the sun is in relation to those 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.

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). 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.

--
“When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror, like the passengers in his car.” Jack Handey
Alastair
http://anorcross.smugmug.com
Equipment in profile

 

[Canon_Guy]

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)

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%? 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? 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 CG277 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.

 

[Alastair Norcross]

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.

--
“When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror, like the passengers in his car.” Jack Handey
Alastair

anorcross

Keen hobbyist since teaching myself film photography as a teenager in the 70s, using manual SLRs and black and white film. Love photographing people and animals.

anorcross.smugmug.com

Equipment in profile

 

[jumpthesnark]

Congrats on the new camera, and thanks for sharing your initial impressions with us.

What are you using for post processing? I know this is very subjective and largely up to individual taste, but there's a strong HDR type look in a lot of those images, and what looks like over-saturation with the blue (daylight from windows) rimlight on the people sitting at the table indoors. Likewise that last image has a similarly strong (to me) HDR look. I don't see this look in all images, though.

Do you have any unprocessed JPEGs straight from the camera that you're willing to share?

Thanks again, and best of luck with the R6 II!

I use DXO Photolab. I'm afraid I don't shoot JPEG, so I don't have any OOC JPEGs. I do a bit more highlight and shadow recovery than some people like, and the last one is certainly not to everyone's taste (that's why I posted the alternate version too). Colorado has a lot of blue sky, and colors are certainly different up here from how they are in some other parts. Sometimes people look at blue skies in my shots and think I've overdone it, but that's often the way the skies actually look here.

Thanks much! I'm not familiar with DXO for post, will look into it.

I'm familiar with Colorado and other higher-elevation places, where the skies can be achingly blue. I was mostly noticing the color of indirect daylight coming through the windows and onto the subjects in the indoors photos that was showing up as very strongly blue, as the auto white balance was (I assume) mostly correcting for the warm indoor light.

Best of luck, and many happy shots with your new Canon!

 

[R6iiowner]

Talking mainly AF and how it sometimes struggles to find the eye in low light in vertical position. Now, I've set Horiz... and Vert... focus points to be the same but it doesn't work great. Also still too much noise at 6400 where I shoot most of the time. I use lightroom to process and usually stay under 50% with NR.