oscar_van_der_velde

<p>Keith is right about these weaknesses, but for 90% of shots DPP gives the best instant results in terms of colors and contrast. Texture detail and recovery of contrasty scenes are not great, but such detail you won't see if the purpose is to produce web sized images. <br>

Any other converter and I found myself tweaking all the sliders, with annoyingly small increments, settling at something that looks pretty good, but when opening the same file later it just looked cheesy and I could start all over again. Some converters like RawTherapee used to be incredibly slow compared to DPP but this may have improved.</p>

<p>Your question is typical for the transition slide film to digital. Slides give you instant gratification. You're asking about having to deal with color corrections in digital. I don't think it's any reason to worry about it, you don't even have to buy expensive software. Just start with Canon's own software DPP (Digital Photo Professional) to open your raw files, a matter of seconds. Many agree that its colors are the best, though its interface and contrast control are lacking. As a default it applies the picture style you set on the camera. You can then tweak it to fit best to the contrast and white balance of the scene, even correct the exposure, things you could not do with slides. If you don't, then the results will be pretty similar to shooting slides! Compared to Velvia be prepared to discover many things in the deep shadows. You may apply a tweak to all photos at once and batch convert to JPG or TIFF or send to other photo editing software. There hardly any noticeable differences between similar models of DSLRs. </p>

 

<p>I assume you are speaking of daytime lightning photography. At night you just need to open your shutter and wait. During the day there are several strategies to choose from. You can either react on a flash and it lasts or produces another strike when the shutter is open, or you can fire more or less randomly some shots when lightning should almost occur again. In the first case shorter shutter lag time helps, frames per second probably not that much since most of the time the first exposure is the one that counts. It does fill up your card faster. When you're deleting shots, Murphy's law tells the best lightning will happen. Note that minimizing your aperture beyond f/11 to increase exposure time will just give you less visible lightning. Also you need to expose darker (i.e. shorter) than you normally would, to make the flash stand out better. An advantage of the 6D is wifi: put the camera on a tripod in an all-weather housing, yourself in the car, and control it safely with a phone or laptop. The safest way to capture close strikes.</p>

<p>If you need zoom for the task then there's no arguing, but consider that the EF 135mm F/2 L will give you 4x shorter exposures or a two stops cleaner ISO setting.</p>

<p>You could always convert your stored CR2 files in 20 years (with DNG or so many other free raw converters), if needed. I mean, just look at a program like Irfanview how many types of files it can read. Old operating systems and software can be run in virtual machines. I'd be more worried about long-term data integrity of storage media.</p>

<p>You have also a choice of Sigma 20mm, 24mm and 28mm F1.8 lenses, or Zeiss 25mm F2. They are just not really smaller, probably because in the digital age we have higher demands on image quality, which requires more complex designs. <br>

Bokeh at f/2 may not always be nicer than at f/2.8, depending on the lens. At wide angle a lot depends on the shooting distance. The new EF 28mm and 24mm F2.8 IS lenses have more aperture blades than the 35mm F2 which also helps.<br>

If speed is your primary criterion, well, Canon has given you that since the old FD times... Even over the last 5 years they gave you an extra stop of clean ISO performance and now they have thrown in 3-4 stops of IS. And they kept it small. Even at f/2.8 the new 24mm and 28mm good performers, much better than the 28mm f/1.8:<br>

http://www.photozone.de/canon_eos_ff/774-canon28f28isff?start=1</p>

<p>Looks like oily substance. I once got the same thing the first time I tried cleaning my 5D sensor. It can be removed using many cotton buds slightly moistened by high-quality isopropyl alcohol (low quality alcohol may leave residues). Don't swipe this stuff into the corners... Maybe it's a better idea to have it professionally cleaned.</p>

<p>The 5D III has a pixel area of 6.25·6.25 µm and does 6 frames per second of 22.3 MP = 133.8 MP/s. The 6D has a pixel area of 6.55·6.55 µm and does 4.5 frames per second at 20.2 MP = 90.9 MP/s. Both have one DIGIC 5+ with two 4-channel A/D converters. Slower A/D conversion (1.5x) is good and larger pixels (1.1x) as well. So the 6D may well perform a little better in the noise department. We don't know numbers about the fill factor, microlenses and quantum efficiency, though.</p>

<p>Does anyone know from experience if it is easy to set the lens to infinity focus manually? For use at night, without live view.</p>

<p>Of course there is a use for a built-in flash. While I bought a nice 270EX flash for my 5D, I had the following problems a built-in flash would solve:<br>

1) I forgot to bring the flash with me<br>

2) I forgot to bring its batteries<br>

3) I forgot to charge the batteries</p>

<p>But careful, 5D is not supported by 64 bit Windows (it does run in XP Mode if your Windows version includes this). And recent versions of DPP will not work together EOS Utility 2.7.3, the last one supporting the 5D. ut the EOS Solutions disk that came with the camera should work (and is needed for updating software).</p>

<p>I've never had the need to use my 5D that way, so I did not try it, but EOS Utility software can operate the camera attached via USB. It works together with DPP. I've seen it can monitor a folder for incoming files from the camera. This sounds like what you need.</p>

<p>It has no Live View so any checking would be after taking a shot.</p>

<p>I would love to see this 6D rumor come true, but then with more inspiring features. 5D mark III is mainly an autofocus and speed update to the 5D II. Great for those who need it for their shooting, but I suspect landscape photographers have little benefit of it. A 6D with the specs as rumored is hardly different from a 5D mark II made of plastic. I wonder how that is going to compete against anything else in its €1500-2000 price class for the next three years.<br>

Lower price may be a "feature", but this camera needs something special that sells it, hopefully something good for landscape shooters. It does not take much fantasy to come up with features that could make this camera a winner while not eating sales from the 5D III: <br>

Vari-angle screen. Significantly higher dynamic range or higher resolution. USB 3.0. Timelapse functions. Crisper HD video and JPG output. Wider HDR bracketing. HDR video. Maybe weather-sealing (even Olympus offers this and the camera is cheaper). </p>

<p> </p>

<blockquote>

<p>The problem is that Canon have dropped support for direct connection of the 20D under recent versions of Windows, and I think you will either need to find a machine running XPSP2/3, or run under XP Mode after installing it under Win7Pro or above.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I use an EOS 5D from about the same era, the software still installs fine on Windows (XP/Vista/7) 32-bit versions, but EOS Utility, at least the version supporting these cameras (2.7), is incompatible with 64-bits systems. In that case install and run it in XP Mode (a virtual machine which is included in Professional or better editions of Windows 7)</p>

I'm not a user of the galleries myself, but let me guess: you uploaded a small and a large version of the same photo. After uploading, the small image fits the gallery default and shows the way you saw it. For the large image Photo.net made a smaller preview image. But apparently the algorithm used for this is not as good as the one used by DPP to downsample the image. I suspect the preview will look a bit less soft if you sharpen the large image before saving.

<p>There is also the Tamron 60mm f/2 macro.</p>

<p>try PixelFixer (http://www.pixelfixer.org). Take a dark frame to map the pixels and then run it on your raw files.</p>

<p>Yes, at least the downsampling and sharpening looks equally horrible. Looks like Unsharp Mask with a too large radius and a too high threshold applied to a soft (moiré-reduced?) image. Unfortunately, while we can get around this shooting RAW instead of JPEG, we're out of luck when shooting video.</p>

<p>Here is one example of what DPP can produce from just a single EOS 5D image:<br>

<a title="20110920_38_hdr by lightningwizard, on Flickr" href=" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7191/7015115037_fc28bed29a_z.jpg" alt="20110920_38_hdr" width="640" height="427" /></a><br>

It often works great in combination with the "Linear" option.</p>

<p>Even better, DPP has now a very good HDR engine built in which works with up to three image files (CR2 but also JPG or TIFF). It allows finetuning of parameters, the camera's settings are just presets.</p>

<p>Megapixels are just one characteristic of sensors. There is increasing concern in the Canon user community that other sensor qualities have hardly improved. High ISO signal to noise ratio appears to have reached a limit among sensors of different manufacturers (for now), but we are now seeing that more than 14 stops of dynamic range at ISO 100 can be had along with more megapixels, instead of the 12 of Canon, without pattern noise. Meanwhile separation of red shades as in 5D III test raws is not what it used to be (e.g. 5D, 1Ds III).</p>

<p><strong>Edit</strong>: found the reason: "High Quality" (moiré reduction) versus "High Speed" in DPP preferences. Being used to the 5D, there never was a large difference and I had it at "High Quality". Now it is HUGE. If you want detail in the 5D III using DPP, set it to "High Speed". After doing this and setting the same sharpening, at ISO 3200 I see effectively very little differences between these three cameras in these test images: maybe 1/3rd stop improvement of the 5D III compared to 5D II and at the pixel level it looks the same as the 5D, which is 1/4+1/3 stop faster at the same ISO though, so effectively all benefit comes just from the increase in number of pixels. Still would be good to verify with more tests.<br>

<br /> Since the original poster did his test using DPP, was it set to "High Quality" or "High Speed"? I strongly recommend the latter.</p>

<p>In your review: "Note: for the same aperture, shutter speed and ISO combination, the 5D Mkiii underexposed, versus the Mkii, by around 1/4 of a stop. This was compensated for by slowing down the shutter speed for each of the 5D Mkiii images, instead of adjusting in post processing."<br>

Unfortunately, you are giving the 5D mk III the advantage of more available light. You should have adjusted the exposure digitally. This is what the camera should have done with analog gain in the first place, to get the same image brightness at the same exposure. Effectively this means the ISO value of the mk III is lower than what it really says.<br>

If you download CR2 files from Imaging Resource of the 5D, 5D II and 5D III, you will notice that:</p>

<ul>

<li>5D III: ISO 3200, 1/400 f/8</li>

<li>5D II: ISO 3200, 1/400 f/8</li>

<li>5D: ISO 3200, 1/500 f/8 and image is even 0.33 stop brighter than the other two after equalizing white balance and contrast.</li>

</ul>

<p>I note several things in DPP: 5D III files do not sharpen by the same amount for the same slider settings (noise and sharpening). 5D III also has poorer detail in the red compared to both 5D and 5D II with all noise reduction and sharpening turned off. So I turned everything to zero, saved as TIFF and sharpened in another program. Strangely I can't get the 5D III image as sharp as the 5D II and it is not a focus/DOF issue. It looks like they crippled DPP because even Irfanview can get more detail out of it, in fact a little more than the 5D II. While I like the new HDR in DPP, it's disappointing to see it can't pull 5D III details the way it can with 5D and 5D II!</p>

 

<p>Unless you intend to shoot only JPEG images, it is more useful to look at RAW images. Not sure why Canon cannot match the RAW processing qualities of their Digital Photo Professional software in-camera. Canon's own official sample JPEGs look awful even at low ISO but a RAW file I downloaded from Imaging Resource looked great.</p>