And lo On Tue, 04 May 2010 20:52:05 +0100, Fredrik Eriksson  
<fe79}--at--{yahoo}--dot--{com> did spake thusly:

> On Tue, 04 May 2010 21:12:53 +0200, Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>>
>> I realise the lense is important. My mum has an 8 MP camera, and it  
>> takes crap pictures compared to my lowly 3 MP camera. I'm sure it's  
>> because hime has a 45 mm lense and hers has a 4.5 mm lense.
>
> Mostly, it is because the sensor in your camera is much larger than the  
> one in hers. Sensor size matters a lot; pixel density not so much. The  
> focal length of the lens is not in any way a reliable indicator of  
> quality; the lens in her camera is smaller because the tiny sensor does  
> not require a larger lens.

Tooting my horn I did an entire 4 part guide to digital cameras last year.

http://flipc.blogspot.com/2009/03/digital-camera-guide-part-1.html

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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Phil Cook v2 wrote:

> Tooting my horn I did an entire 4 part guide to digital cameras last year.

Heh. And perhaps you remember me remarking at the time that you can 
apparently buy a £200 Nikon D40 (?) and attach a £7,000 telephoto lense 
to it - as if you'd want to. ;-)

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>> That is under 2 MP yet you would absolutely need a multi-thousand pound 
>> lens to get that shot (purely because flood lights are not that bright 
>> compared to daylight, and when you're zoomed in that much on action you 
>> need a *really* fast shutter speed to avoid motion blur).
>
> Hell, *my* 3 MP camera would never, ever take a picture like that, no 
> matter how perfect the lighting or how close up you were. The sensor just 
> isn't of high enough quality.

If it was bright enough and you were a metre or two away from the action 
then even a cheap consumer digital camera should give a pretty decent image:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/visithra/321853035/

That one was taken with a Canon A620.

The most obvious difference to the pro photo is that the background doesn't 
get blurred (due to the small sensor size and low focal length).

And of course you can't always stand 2 metres from the action and ask for 
daylight :-)

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> Heh. And perhaps you remember me remarking at the time that you can 
> apparently buy a £200 Nikon D40 (?) and attach a £7,000 telephoto lense to 
> it - as if you'd want to. ;-)

A friend of mine borrowed a 7K (or similar) telephoto lens to put on his old 
Canon 300D body when he went to watch an air show.  The photos are 
absolutely stunning, and I don't think if he had used a more expensive body 
the photos would have been *much* better (but on the other hand, without the 
big lens they would have been rubbish).

If you want to take action photos of things from far away under dodgy light, 
then even the cheapest dSLR body will be fine, just get the biggest lens you 
can afford.

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>> Hell, *my* 3 MP camera would never, ever take a picture like that, no 
>> matter how perfect the lighting or how close up you were. The sensor 
>> just isn't of high enough quality.
> 
> If it was bright enough and you were a metre or two away from the action 
> then even a cheap consumer digital camera should give a pretty decent 
> image:
> 
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/visithra/321853035/
> 
> That one was taken with a Canon A620.

Well, try this:

http://www.orphi.me.uk/rev1/04-Photos/2007-04-14/DSCF0064.html

That's probably a metre or two away, it's a dazzlingly bright June 
afternoon, and the image sucks. It's flat and utterly devoid of colour.

http://www.orphi.me.uk/rev1/04-Photos/2007-04-14/DSCF0011.html

Similar deal. No contrast anywhere, half the frame is bleached white, 
and it doesn't even appear to be properly in focus in places.

These images are scaled down; usually the full-res image is horribly 
grainy too. (Because, let's face it, usually it *isn't* a dazzlingly 
bright June afternoon, and my camera is supremely insensitive to light. 
If it's not blinding sunshine, it wants to use the flash...)

There's no way my camera would ever capture the lush colours and sharp 
edges of the images you show.

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> There's no way my camera would ever capture the lush colours and sharp 
> edges of the images you show.

Play with the settings!  Both on the camera and in your PC software.  No 
professional would ever dream of using the "Auto" mode and using whatever 
image the camera happened to produce.

Attached is after 5 seconds in Paint Shop Pro.

If your camera is not so good at deciding the exposure and colour for itself 
then you must step in and either force the camera (eg by reducing the 
exposure or setting it manually) and/or post process it on your PC.

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Attachments:
Download 'dscf0064.jpg' (118 KB)

Preview of image 'dscf0064.jpg'

On Wed, 05 May 2010 10:17:21 +0200, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>
> And here I was thinking that a larger lense lets more light in...

Which a larger sensor needs, because there is more sensor area to cover.



>  From what I've seen, if you buy an expensive camera, you get all kinds  
> of crazy things like external flash, external exposure control (i.e.,  
> you can have a 2-hour exposure if you want), software remote control,  
> more colour balance settings than any sane person could possibly need,  
> and so on.

I guess you consider most professional (and some hobbyist) photographers  
insane then.



-- 
FE

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scott wrote:
>> There's no way my camera would ever capture the lush colours and sharp 
>> edges of the images you show.
> 
> Play with the settings!  Both on the camera and in your PC software.  No 
> professional would ever dream of using the "Auto" mode and using 
> whatever image the camera happened to produce.

The camera itself doesn't have much you can adjust. Off the top of my head:

- "Colour balance" has three options:
   - "Normal".
   - "Indoor", which makes the picture slightly more blue.
   - "Outdoor", which makes the picture slightly more yellow.

- "Exposure", which has options something like "-2, -1, 0, +1, +2". 
Setting it to zero gives you normal images, turning it down makes the 
picture blacker, turning it up makes the picture whiter.

> Attached is after 5 seconds in Paint Shop Pro.

It has slightly more colour now, but it's nothing like the lush greens 
and deep browns you'd see in a glossy magazine.

> If your camera is not so good at deciding the exposure and colour for 
> itself then you must step in and either force the camera (eg by reducing 
> the exposure or setting it manually) and/or post process it on your PC.

Once the picture is taken, any detail which isn't captured in the image 
is gone forever, and can never be brought back. You can turn the 
brightness up or down, but you can't turn pure black (or pure white) 
into detail. If you're lucky, you might be able to reveal the JPEG 
compression artifacts, but that is all. You also can't focus a fuzzy 
image, or remove graininess.

In short, post-processing is a hopeless task. You have to make the 
camera take a half-decent image in the first place.

A new camera is just one of the things on my [huge] list of things to 
buy one day. (Quite aside from picture issues, my camera eats batteries 
for no apparent reason...)

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> - "Colour balance" has three options:
>   - "Normal".
>   - "Indoor", which makes the picture slightly more blue.
>   - "Outdoor", which makes the picture slightly more yellow.

So obviously you will need to tweak these later in an image program.  Take a 
photo of something white in the same location to get a good reference for 
later post-processing.

> It has slightly more colour now, but it's nothing like the lush greens and 
> deep browns you'd see in a glossy magazine.

Just tweak it as much as you want in your software - I didn't want to make 
it look too fake though.  Here's your other photo attached.  With digital 
it's so easy to make it look so much better.

> Once the picture is taken, any detail which isn't captured in the image is 
> gone forever, and can never be brought back. You can turn the brightness 
> up or down, but you can't turn pure black (or pure white) into detail.

That is why it is very important that the exposure is not set too high when 
you take the photo.  If you look at the histogram of the photo I edited, it 
is obvious a lot of pixels are clipped at white.  If you'd turned down the 
exposure a bit on the camera then the colours would probably have turned out 
more saturated already. (eg RGB=100,200,100 exposed double gives 
RGB=200,255,200 which looks washed out)

> If you're lucky, you might be able to reveal the JPEG compression 
> artifacts, but that is all.

IME cameras save JPEG with extremely low compression, like the 1/100 setting 
in an image editor.

> You also can't focus a fuzzy image

Your photos didn't look fuzzy to me.

> In short, post-processing is a hopeless task.

Professionals would disagree with you.

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Attachments:
Download 'dscf0064.jpg' (700 KB)

Preview of image 'dscf0064.jpg'

scott wrote:
>> - "Colour balance" has three options:
>>   - "Normal".
>>   - "Indoor", which makes the picture slightly more blue.
>>   - "Outdoor", which makes the picture slightly more yellow.
> 
> So obviously you will need to tweak these later in an image program.  
> Take a photo of something white in the same location to get a good 
> reference for later post-processing.

I have had some limited success with this. Certainly if the problem is 
the image having too much of one colour, that's usually fixable. What 
isn't fixable is lighting problems. (E.g., part of the image is 
correctly lit, but everything else is too dark.)

>> It has slightly more colour now, but it's nothing like the lush greens 
>> and deep browns you'd see in a glossy magazine.
> 
> Just tweak it as much as you want in your software - I didn't want to 
> make it look too fake though.  Here's your other photo attached.  With 
> digital it's so easy to make it look so much better.

Now that's more like it. (Although, again, obviously you can't do much 
about the over-exposed leaves.)

>> Once the picture is taken, any detail which isn't captured in the 
>> image is gone forever, and can never be brought back. You can turn the 
>> brightness up or down, but you can't turn pure black (or pure white) 
>> into detail.
> 
> That is why it is very important that the exposure is not set too high 
> when you take the photo.

Or too low, for that matter.

>> If you're lucky, you might be able to reveal the JPEG compression 
>> artifacts, but that is all.
> 
> IME cameras save JPEG with extremely low compression, like the 1/100 
> setting in an image editor.

My camera has several image quality settings. Unfortunately, as I 
explained, it eats batteries. If you're not using the camera even for 
five minutes, you have to take the batteries out or they won't last the 
day. Unfortunately that resets all the settings, which you then have to 
go and put back in. Most particularly, the camera defaults back to 
lower-resolution images.

Anyway, the available settings are "1 MP", "2 MP", "3 MP Natural" and "3 
MP Fine". The difference between the last two is in the amount of JPEG 
compression. (It's plausible there's also some image sharpening or 
something, but that doesn't appear to be the case.)

>> You also can't focus a fuzzy image
> 
> Your photos didn't look fuzzy to me.

These ones aren't, no. I was just making the point.

>> In short, post-processing is a hopeless task.
> 
> Professionals would disagree with you.

Professionals would have taken decent photos in the first place. ;-)

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