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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.
Post a reply to this message
Attachments:
Download 'dscf0064.jpg' (118 KB)
Preview of image 'dscf0064.jpg'
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On Wed, 05 May 2010 10:17:21 +0200, Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> 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.
Post a reply to this message
Attachments:
Download 'dscf0064.jpg' (700 KB)
Preview of image 'dscf0064.jpg'
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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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>> You also can't focus a fuzzy image
>
> Your photos didn't look fuzzy to me.
Try this one:
http://www.orphi.me.uk/rev1/04-Photos/2007-04-14/DSCF0016.html
(For whatever reason, my camera utterly refuses to focus on small
objects. I guess it's beyond the physical limits of the lense system or
something...)
Trying to sharpen the image just amplifies the JPEG compression, sadly.
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And lo On Wed, 05 May 2010 09:41:03 +0100, scott <sco### [at] scottcom> did
spake thusly:
>> 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. ;-)
That and the poor quality of your mum's camera.
> 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.
Toot "This is where DSLRs rule as they're both bigger and have
interchangable lenses. In this case the maxim is simple - the bigger the
better. A bigger lens means more light getting to the sensor, means a
faster shutter speed and less blur, and a lower ISO and more detail and
less noise." ;-)
--
Phil Cook
--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com
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> What isn't fixable is lighting problems. (E.g., part of the image is
> correctly lit, but everything else is too dark.)
A better camera won't fix this. If you really want to fix this then just
take two different exposures and combine them later in software. Pros have
to do this too when they can't control the lighting.
>>> In short, post-processing is a hopeless task.
>>
>> Professionals would disagree with you.
>
> Professionals would have taken decent photos in the first place. ;-)
They looked decent enough to me! And typically pros will not let the camera
do *any* processing, and import the raw sensor data to their computer for
manual colour, sharpness and exposure control.
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And lo On Wed, 05 May 2010 09:53:59 +0100, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> did
spake thusly:
>>> 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/DSCF0011.html
That looks familiar I wonder why?
http://flipc.blogspot.com/2009/04/orphis-photos-part-2.html
--
Phil Cook
--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com
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