The Carriage

Can I take a seat here? Very romantic place indeed.....

We were staying in the hotel in South Street, Valletta. The hotel

kitchen caters for mainly the package trade. However, all was not

lost. In South Street alone there are four decent restaurants (and a

really, really decent one just around the corner). This is one of the

four, The Carriage Restaurant, situated on a roof top of an office

block, and a very romantic place to wine and dine in the early

evening. It is popular with local businessmen at lunch times.

Antonio, very nice job on the lighting, near and far, down to the glass reflections. having read your old post regarding photoshop, what do you currently use for processing? regards, mmwhite.

Hi Michelle,

 

Software? Yes. Lots.

 

These days I am shooting the holiday stuff on a Nikon D70s with 10-20mm Sigma, 30mm Sigma, 18-70 Nikon and 70-300 Nikon lenses.

 

The medium and large format equipment is now for serious photography.

 

I have a Pixman SV "hard drive" (www.aquaindigo.com), and copy the camera memory card every evening. The Pixman SV has software which decodes very many raw formats, including NEF (and my wife's Panasonic FZ50), so there is no point in shooting anything other than raw. Its 3.6" screen is quite adequate for viewing.

 

However, apart from the 30mm f/1.4 Sigma lens, which is an absolute cracker, and much better than the equivalent Nikon lenses (and more expensive), the other lenses leave a lot to be desired in the aberrations department. The 18-70mm Nikon lens at 18mm is particularly bad - I can easily see barrel distortion through the viewfinder, getting on for that of a diagonal fisheye.

 

A French company, DxO Labs (www.dxo.com) have taken this on with a very impressive product, DxO Optics Pro. They have laboriously calibrated quite a few digital camera bodies, and the lenses that they can take, and for many of the higher end cameras they support the camera's raw format. When an image is processed with their software, the before and after comparison can be quite startling.

 

Version 4 includes other image processing facilities. I find that their perspective correction facility is mathematically correct, and it allows me to use the 10-20 lens for architectural work, and get the same sort of results that a large format camera with all the movements would give (but obviously not the resolution). The Cathedral interiors were done with the 10-20 lens. It was not easy, because the maximum aperture of the lens is f/4 and the Cathedrals are quite dark inside, and the authorities do not like tripods on the marble tombstones.

 

Photoshop does have a lens correction filter, but you have to do it totally by eye, where as DxO Optics Pro does barrel/pincushion distortion and chromatic aberration corrections fully automatically because it knows what the body and lens were.

 

Panorama Tools can do a much better job of lens correction than Photoshop, as well as stitching together a panorama, and you do not do it by eye - you mark the image with control points, if the automatically generated ones are inadequate.

 

The other image processing software that I use is Stoik's PictureMan 5.0 Pro (www.stoik.com). It is aimed at professional photographers (silver as well as digital), and has quite a few rather advanced image processing facilities. In particular, it has a very sophisticated clone brush facility. Unlike Photoshop, all its facilities work with 48-bit images, and they can all be applied with a brush, as well as to an area or to the whole image.

 

One piece of software that I do have is a plug-in filter for both PictureMan and Photoshop which applies graduated filters. I wrote it myself to emulate the whole range of Lee Filters' graduated filters (www.leefilters.com), which are by no means cheap, because they are aimed squarely at professional photographers and cinematographers.

 

I also use Paint Shop Pro (mine is a very old version, and only handles 24-bit images) for things like adding borders, text, etc. It has a colour balance adjustment which is calibrated in degrees Kelvin - very useful if your camera white balance setting did not match the incident light. I have not seen that facility in any other image processing software.

 

All in all, it is horses for courses - some things can be done much more easily with one program than the others, and there is no one image processing package that can do everything that I want.

 

What I will say, though, is that DxO Optics Pro is an excellent investment, especially if you have bought an expensive (and crappy) digital SLR.