fanta

I must disagree with the general statements Dan made. Both the HP LP2065 and NEC 2070 NX I tried beat the heck in terms of color accuracy, gray ramps accuracy and neutrality, and usability for soft-proofing, out of my previous NEC MultiSync 19" CRT (200 USD). All of them, LCDs and CRT, calibrated and profiled with the same sensor and software.

 

A critical aspect of the two displays I mentioned is that image remains stable when moving your head around (within certain limits of course). The same does not happen for all LCDs, e.g ViewSonic VP2030B, where the shift is obvious just moving the head a little.

 

Color Eyes Display Pro allows to calibrate the display adjusting the R, G and B manually from the display controls (OSD), or automatically through DDC with displays and graphic adapters supporting it. Then during profiling it computes both the Color LUT for the graphic adapter and the Color LUT for the display (if the display has one, which was not the case for my NEC CRT). However, what convinced me is what I saw on screen, not the gadgets or specs of the display or profiling application and sensor.

 

I refrained for quite a while from moving to an LCD for the same concerns Dan expressed. Then I had a chance to extensively test a couple of displays, and found out some LCDs in the price range I am willing to pay (500 USD) caught up with my needs.

Steven, while I don't expect a 200-400 USD camera to perform like a SLR with prime lenses, I still believe vendors don't deserve indulgency when they deprive us of useful features, while adding "marketing" features that don't add value to us. Let's face it, 400 USD are a LOT of dollars for a compact camera, and I may not get support to shoot RAW, but I may get some useless 800 or 1600 ISO mode that are more noise generators than anything. I may miss an indication of battery status, a vari-angle display, but get no rebate from the vendor, who pockets any increased margin. And what marketing $%@*! really believes that I won't buy a DSLR if I already find RAW support in a compact camera?

 

Same happens in the entry-lever DSLR segment. May be they expect that because I pay 600 USD or so for a body only, I will be so shocked not to notice that the viewfinder sucks! With an EOS Digital Rebel XT I recurrently find myself shooting with both eyes open, because the viewfinder is so small I cannot judge what is in front of me and what is the right time to snap.

 

It must be the mistake of us, the buyers, who are not discerning enough, if vendors feel they can cut down on useful features/qualities and give themselves a rebate.

I am using Color Eyes Display Pro with a DTP94 sensor, and am very happy with them. The application allows to choose between absolute and relative BP, to measure and match the color temperature of your light sources using the colorimeter, to fine-tune by hand the WP after calibration/profiling, to track how your display changes with time and understand when it needs to be calibrated/profiled again (or replaced). It also supports automatic calibration with DDC compliant displays and graphic adapters. Customer support is effective, even if a reply usually comes after 2 days or so.

 

For printer cannot tell, because I have had the profiles I need made by a vendor.

In the range of "business" LCDs at 1600x1200 resolution, I have found HP LP2065 and NEC 2070 NX perform very decently for photography, and I got good results calibrating and profiling them with Color Eyes Display Pro. NEC specs report the display uses an S-IPS panel; HP doesn't tell. Both could be automatically calibrated through DDC. If you look carefully you can find some imperfections, like when displaying completely black, illumination may not be perfectly even around the edges, or when displaying completely white there are slight hue shifts across the screen (most people I know wouldn't notice, I bet). None of these show up in actual photographs though. I have done some subjective evaluation comparing computer generated Q-60 and Q-13 targets against the actual prints from Kodak, and also comparing other test pictures against prints made with custom profiled printer/ink/paper, and am pleased with the results.

 

If you are willing to spend more, I guess you can buy an Eizo SlimEdge, and shouldn't do wrong.

You may want to spend 25 USD for one month of subscription to Lynda.com and look at Chris Orwig trainings in there.

For portraiture I would go for PS CS3 and a subscription to Lynda.com . There is a tutorial from Chris Orwig that by itself is worth more than what you pay for 1 month, and includes several lessons on fashion/potraiture retouching. Learning from books is a pain compared to that. If really on a tight budget, I second Randy: what about PS Elements 5? You can always upgrade to PS CS3 later on. Good luck.

For your web users it shouldn't really matter, as their browser doesn't manage colors anyway, and your pictures will look right if they are in the sRGB color space, even if they don't have the profile embedded. I guess it is actually desirable they don't embed it, because they will be smaller and therefore faster to download.

You should consider keeping the catalogue on the fastest hard-drive you have always on-line (or at least, always at reach when you need it). If you keep the catalogue backups on the same HD, it will protect you from a corruption in the catalogue itself, but not from a total failure of the HD. Consider to store the backups on a separate HD, or at least to copy them to a separate HD every often. The actual photos can spawn multiple drives, and you may leave them where they are should you decide to do so (during the import operation, direct LR to import them from current location). I hope you are backing up your photos too somehow.

 

Regards.

I would send the image to the printer the resolution it is, and let whatever application you are using and/or the printer driver take care of any resampling, unless you have some very specific needs. This unless the image has such a resolution that it bogs down your machine during the printing process.

I have been using PWP for years because within my budget, and also at the time 48 bit support and color management in PS was not up to what I needed (well, it improved a lot since then). If you are on a budget I defenitely recommend it, a possible competitor being Photoshop Elements 5. I bet you can download an evaluation of both and try them out.

 

Note that LR is a different anymal from either: LR is optimized to do global corrections to large amounts of pictures, and also to rate them, keyword them, etc.. With global corrections to a picture I mean as opposed to pixel editing. If you want to afford only one application, I would go for a "pixel editing" one, like PWP or Elements.

As Doug advised, you should look at Wolfe Faust. Also Kodak sells them (not cheap), look for Q-60 Kodak targets, or also IT8 targets of other manufacturers, e.g. on Adorama and B&H. To calibrate and profile the scanner I don't believe it is critical that the target is of the same kind of film you use. For the software, you can find a free one here http://www.aim-dtp.net/index.htm , called XLProfiler; you will need MS Excel and either Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to make it work.

 

In the past I used the combination of a Minolta film scanner, Viewscan and XLProfiler and was pretty happy about it. Didn't consider Silverfast because more expensive than I wanted to pay for. Vuescan also supports scanning of negs, but in my opinion scanning negs is a terrible job, and I could get far more accurate, reliable and beautiful colors from slides (then I was sick and tired of spending nights scanning slides, and switched to DSLR :)

Thank you all for your help. Especially to David for the detailed post. I did some research and believe I will settle for the Cokin P-System, with filters from Tiffen and Singh Ray. Tiffen makes them in glass, and I have some brand loyalty because of positive experience with other filters they make. Of Singh Ray I find the reverse split ND particularly interesting.

I am considering a graduated split ND filter for landscape photography, to

bring down the exposure of the sky. Can you please advise what I might use, to

be mounted on a SLR? E.g. what you are using. I am interested in both round-

threaded filters and filter that allow you to place the graduation where you

need it.

 

Thanks

I would crank up the camera sensitivity and see if I can deal with the extra noise, e.g. printing some picture at the largest size I usually use.

 

Mind you that faster lenses used wide open may give you very shallow depth of field, do the math and see for yourself e.g. with http://www.dofmaster.com/custom.html . I am speaking about centimeters of DOF, with a 50mm used at portrait distance.

 

I purchased a 50mm f/1.4 and a 28mm f/1.8 not much time ago, and found out I actually use them a lot not because of luminosity, but because small and discrete, allowing to take pictures of people without intimidating them. Also recently I was reviewing a set of pictures partly taken with a very decent amateurial zoom, and suddenly... snap!... from a given picture onward, they were just better... crisp, more contrasty, and looking at metadata, I saw since that picture I had switched to the 50mm f/1.4.

 

Anyway, before investing in more glass, I would try to make up my mind about what I actually miss, based on the kind of photography I do.

I believe the first set of curves are the correction that your calibration s/w is going to do in the LUT (Look-up Table), the second diagram compares the color space of your display with the gamut of human vision. There is quite something to learn about it, you can start from Norman Korean tutorial, it also has pointers to additional material, see http://www.normankoren.com/color_management.html

I would definitely go for 6500K calibration, and let the calibration/profiling s/w do the corrections it has to do, that's its purpose. I don't have your same display, and don't have an answer for the backlight level. In any case, you are not supposed to set it to a level where you feel you need sun glasses :)

It's a Graphire4. Actually the pen had just been replaced because previously was defective, now should be OK.

 

I was holding it with the tip touching the tablet. I will try setting the Tip Feel to "harder" in the set-up, which is I believe what Mike was referring to.

I am trying to understand if my pen tablet is malfunctioning or works as

designed.

 

When I move the pen across the tablet on Windows desktop, it keeps making a

selection. That is, it behaves like when you drag the mouse with the button

pressed.

 

Does your Wacom pen tablet behave the same? And what model do you have?

 

Thanks.

If you are willing to pay 25 USD, you will find it on lynda.com, look for "Enhancing Digital Photography with Photoshop CS2, with Chris Orwig". It includes a pretty sophisticated example of an interior taken in a boat. Actually that fee will buy you attendance to whatever training they have for one month.

Creepy, it looks like the eyes of a stuffed animal.

BTW, here there is an interesting article about diffraction:

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/diffraction-photography.htm

it includes a diffraction calculator, which gave me indications consistent with what I actually observed with my camera.

Well, I really meant 8 bit/channel/pixel.

Hello Sean. Just convert to 8 bit/pixel and then sRGB before saving the JPeg to be used for the web.

 

Yes, converting the picture to your display color profile will make it look right in non color managed applications... but only as long as you use your display. You can expect people viewing your pics on the web to have a different display, therefore they will get unpredictable, possibly bad results. For those, the safest choice is to convert to sRGB, which usually looks very decent in non color managed applications.

Todd, for some experimenting, you can try taking pictures of bills. They have a lot of fine details, finer and less fine, and also some letters/numbers and recognizable faces or pictures. I found them very good to do subjective evaluations.

 

You should use a tripod, ensure constant illumination throughout the test, ensure bills are perfectly flat, and use a cable release or remote control or timed release or, better, connect the camera to a PC/Mac and shoot from there (assuming your software/camera support it).

 

I would recommend shooting RAW if available, otherwise taking the sharpening as low as possible. Also printing some of the test pictures (enlarging 1:1 on screen you may see slight differences that don't really matter once printed)

 

I experimented like that returning from a trip, because many images were not as sharp as expected. I then figured out it was because I closed the diaphragm too much and got too much diffraction.

 

Anyway, I bet the sweet spot will be around f/8 :)

Josh, LR does it. However, when you have to locate the removable media where the original is, and put it back to your HD, LR doesn't really help you. Applications like IMatch do a much better job in that regard, with complete support for off-line content. If anything you are looking for is handling your off-line pictures, also organizing them and making searches, I would try IMatch. This said, LR has a lot more to offer.

Actually I am using actions to print with PS CS. Limit I found is that the Page set-up dialog (may be also the Print with Preview, not sure) default to the last value used. So I first open a picture, set parameters in those dialogs, close the picture, and then run my action to print on a set of pictures. The action opens each file, resizes it with no interpolation, applies sharpening, prints and closes the file without saving. Piece of cake.