david_moore13

Overexposing ISO 1600 by one stop is basically identical to shooting at ISO 800. However, there's one important difference: You are much more likely to clip highlights by overexposing one stop.

 

So why not just shoot ISO 800?

If by "individual files" you mean the original, high-resolution images from your camera, then no, it's just not possible to get them off a video DVD. The reason is that they were never put on the DVD in the first place. The video itself has a resolution of 720x480 or 640x480, and that is as high resolution as it gets. The program you use to create the slideshow will not store the original files on the DVD.

 

On the other hand, if you, as the photographer, wanted to put high resolution copies of the images on the DVD, you could do it -- but then the DVD could not be played on a TV, it would have to be used from a computer.

 

As for PDFs, I've never tried to extract images from a PDF before, but I'm sure it's not very hard. There are freely available PDF viewers not made by Adobe, and I believe most of these viewers do not enforce the copy protection.

I use Linux, and generally all the DVD playing software for Linux allows you to take a screen capture of a playing DVD. I imagine some of the Windows software allows it too. The less mainstream the software, the greater the chance that it allows you to take a screen capture.

 

That being said, I wouldn't lose sleep over the issue. A DVD has a resolution of approximately 640x480 which when printed, would be very coarse. A technical person who knew how to copy would also know how bad 640x480 would look when printed. You could get similar (poor) results piecing together thumbnails from Pictage, etc. and I haven't really heard of people doing that.

Would you mind posting the original raw file somewhere? We can examine it to see if the detail in the pillow was actually blown out or not. If it was truly blown out, the only solution would have been to lower your exposure compensation at the time the shot was taken.

Going to Tom's Hardware is a good suggestion. And yes, Dave, I think getting what looks good to you is the best way to judge. Ideally, put one of your photos on each screen to evaluate. It's hard to tell without calibrating each display, but it will give you an idea of which ones have adequate contrast, black levels, etc. And make sure they have a wide viewing angle too -- a too narrow viewing angle can make them hard to calibrate satisfactorily.

The bad news with LCDs is that the specs are usually misleading. You just have to see it for yourself to know if it will be adequate. As was already said -- the response time is mostly irrelevant for photo editing. On mine, the response time is 25ms, and that looks just fine to me (I don't play games with it). And no, you won't see flicker. Although the refresh rate is usually slower than CRTs, the monitor does not flicker because the pixels don't need refresh -- they stay illuminated.

 

A brightness control is useful, but other controls might do more harm than good. Each color pixel (red, green, and blue) on an LCD usually only has 256 possible values. If you adjust the color temperature control, it usually just contrains those 256 values to some subset that results in the right color temperature. For example, if you want a "bluer" color temperature, the controller might constrain the red pixels to be 0-230 instead of 0-255. Thus, you've lost some resolution which can lead to banding in the worst case. The brightness control is usually fine though because it changes the real brightness of the backlight. All other adjustments are best made by your monitor calibration software.

 

But the bottom line is that the specs aren't very useful. Many people are happy with the Apple and Dell displays as a general recommendation though.

The quality of the Scan Dual IV when scanning B&W is probably just as good as the more expensive brands, and it's certainly a lot cheaper. As you probably already know, ICE will be of no value when scanning B&W. If I were in your situation, I would just get the Scan Dual IV because you'll probably save money in the long run even in the unlikely scenario that it breaks.

 

With the Scan Dual IV, the most common problem seems to be that it's dead-on-arrival, so make sure you purchase somewhere that accepts returns.

If you are just concerned about "sharpness", don't worry because LCDs always look sharp at their native resolution. In fact, they are often considered _too_ sharp for image editing, which is helped by some "blur" between pixels that only CRTs can provide.

 

However, you should worry about resolution. That NEC is only 1280x1024, which is pretty low resolution for running photoshop. What resolution do you currently run now? You'd probably be happier with a higher resolution display -- something like 1600x1200.

 

Don't get too hung up on getting the perfect display colorimetrically. As long as you get a decent monitor, just calibrate it and be done with it. You probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway once they are calibrated.

As I understand it, the "lock film base color" just chooses the lightest highlight, and makes that the base color. If your brightest highlight just happens to be a neutral white, you'll get good results if you lock the base color separately for each scan.

 

On the other hand, if your brightest highlight is colored, you'll probably get bad results this way.

I'm working on a Photoshop plugin to help with negative scanning. The idea is to scan the negative as a positive, and then invert properly using the plugin to get good results.

 

Do you have Photoshop and Windows? If so, I can give you a copy of my plugin to test. Also, if you send me your original scan, I could post the results after running it through my plugin to see if it will give good results for you. For that, make sure to scan as a positive using 16-bit linear color depth, no auto exposure, and set the manual exposure to +0 for R, G, B (the defaults).

I'm in the process of developing a Photoshop plugin to do the "inversion" step in software. Do you have Photoshop? PS Elements probably won't suffice for your needs because the extreme color manipulations required for inversion would require an editor that supports 16-bits of color per channel.

 

If you have Photoshop and would like to "beta test" my plugin, email me and I can send you a copy. (I'll make it freely available to everyone eventually but I'll just do it upon request until I get the major bugs worked out).

An easy solution would be to calibrate your monitor while its attached to another computer. Then move the monitor back and copy the profile file. However, note that you MUST use a DVI monitor connection (the white plug) on both computers for this approach to work. With a RGB connection (blue plug) you will get results that depend on the specific video card being used. DVI will be video-card independent as far as I know.

I currently own no Nikon gear, but I'm considering buying a D70s in the near future. One of its traditional selling points is the great 18-70 lens that comes with the kit. However, with this new 18-200, should I skip the kit and just buy the 18-200 with the D70s body only?

 

In other words, does the 18-70 have ANY advantages over the new 18-200?

I'm one of those Linux geeks. I've written software for Linux, such as a tool to edit IPTC data in photos. However, I agree completely with those who say Gimp is unsophisticated and inadequate for serious photography. That being said, the Linux community is very aware of this shortcoming and it is the uninformed (but vocal) few zealots who will tell you that Gimp is as good as Photoshop.

 

There is slow progress being made towards better photography tools under Linux. F-Spot, http://www.gnome.org/projects/f-spot/, is a photo management application. Although it doesn't have serious editing tools, it's meant for tagging, organization, and metadata editing. It also has proper color management support.

 

There's a group working towards the standardization of color management under Linux (and other OSes) here: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/OpenIcc Once that groundwork is laid, perhaps we'll see a lot more ICC-aware applications under Linux.

 

Of course, all this is in its early stages, so I can't recommend Linux for a serious photographer. I just felt it important to say that there is good work being done, and soon there will be a decent supply of proper applications. I myself have some ideas for a great photo editing and RAW manipulation application, but it's unlikely I'll have the time to implement it anytime soon.

I'd say combine (2) and (4). Hold up a gray card for the first shot, and then use that as your 18% gray spot for setting WB in ACR.

 

You could use a MacBeth color checker for greater color accuracy, but that's probably overkill for your purposes. For anything beyond the 18% gray you'll probably be fine doing it by eye. That's just my opinion.

Shooting the graycard as a separate exposure may still be a good idea because it can help you tune the WB with your raw conversion software (in other words, use your software to find a good WB with the graycard exposure, then apply those same settings to the other shots). That way you don't have to rely solely on your eye for each shot.

Since you are scanning negatives, dynamic range will never be a problem, because the dynamic range of the image is contained within a fairly narrow range of film densities.

 

I recommend that you scan and archive the negative images, not the positives. The reason is that the conversion from negative to positive is usually lossy and error-prone. If you keep the negative image, you can always go back and use better software for the negative-to-positive conversion at a later date. For example, the best workflow nowadays would probably be to use Vuescan's "scan from file" to convert a negative to a positive.

Removing the orange mask correctly is not that hard to do, so I suspect most software does a decent job with it. However, color casts can come from many other sources because film inversion is such a complicated procedure. Basically, the colors in the image get dragged through numerous different "color spaces" before you are done with the image:

 

1. The red, green, and blue (and maybe cyan too) spectral sensitivity of the film.

 

2. The cyan, magenta, yellow (and maybe red) color of the film's dye layers.

 

3. The red, green, and blue spectral sensitivity of the film scanner and its light source.

 

4. The working color space of the software.

 

5. The color of your monitor's phosphors.

 

Since 2-3 are imaging the negative rather than the positive, there's a good chance that all these color space conversions will result in some loss of color information. That's why color negatives are so painful to scan. Some types of film work better than others because color spaces 1-5 are a closer match to each other.

 

Many of these problems go away when you print photographic paper because you no longer have to deal with color spaces 3-5. Instead you work with full-spectrum light.

 

Also, film makers strive to make sure that the characteristic curves for red, green, and blue are all identical (except for a constant density shift between each -- the mask color). However, whenever the characteristic curves have slightly different slope, or slightly different sensitivity to light, you will probably get a color cast in your output. This is greatly exacerbated if you use a colored filter over the lens.

Yes, lowering the white point to the edge of the negative's histogram will eliminate the film base color. However, the black point should stay at zero.

 

Next, you can apply the inversion curve (which will look like 1/x for a linear image).

 

Finally, lower the white point of the inverted image. This compensates for exposure differences. Also, the midtone slider will compensate for differing film gammas.

 

The above approach will give pretty good results (assuming the inversion curve is correct). However, there are still some missing pieces:

 

1. Exposing photographic paper produces a nice "roll-off" of highlights without clipping. The above approach will clip highlights which is often ugly. As far as I know, Photoshop has no easy way to do the highlight roll-off.

 

2. The shadows of the above method won't be mapped to "full black" of your monitor. You can compensate with the black point slider of the histogram, although this is not technically correct. There are better ways to do this, which I'm including in my plugin. (An aside: exposing photographic paper the old fashioned way tends to "crush" shadows. Sometimes this looks nice, other times it looses too much detail. Since we are doing it digitally, we can do a better job with some clever math.)

Yes, Jordan, you are completely correct that as long as you are not clipping, you aren't losing information. It would be possible to do inversion correctly by using the Photoshop Curves function, and drawing a custom curve that represents the inversion function. The only problem with this approach is your curve would depend on the film base color and the exact exposure, so it would be a user interface nightmare because it would have to be slightly different for each negative you scan.

 

But as you pointed out, with a B&W negative, it's pretty easy to do this process by hand to get an attractive result (even if it doesn't match the inversion function exactly). With color negatives, it's hard to eliminate color casts using this method.

The only other experiment I can think of is to try scanning the empty film carrier, so there is just air being scanned. And also to do that with and without ICE turned on.

Eric, this is just a totally random and probably bogus idea, but did you try turning off the lights in the room as you scan?

I would do this:

 

1. Set the Minolta software to manual exposure mode and turn off all color management. Also, it's probably best to set it to "16-bit linear" for the output.

 

2. Scan the IT-8 target, adjusting the Minolta exposure settings so that it looks nearly correct, taking care not to clip highlights or shadows. Make a note of the exposure settings you use (or save them).

 

3. Generate the profile from the scanned file from step 2. Just curious: What software do you plan to use for that?

 

4. For any further scans, use the same exposure settings that you used from step 2. Save the output file, open it in Photoshop, and then "Apply Profile" using the profile created in Step 3.

 

Note: I haven't actually tried the above so let me know if it actually works well. You may need to choose "Absolute Colorimetric" as the color conversion mode in the Photoshop color management settings, but I'm not certain of that.

The gamut of LAB includes all visible colors, and is thus larger than any other color space. You won't have gamut limitations with it.

 

There's the possibility of numeric quantization, but that's easily fixed: Just convert your image to 16-bits per channel while you work on it, and convert back to 8-bit before saving.

 

So assuming there are no bugs in Photoshop's implementation, it should be completely safe to convert to LAB and back.

One should never use the Photoshop "Invert" function to convert a negative to a positive. Although the result often "looks about right" it is a mathematical coincidence that causes this to be true. You are not performing the same mathematical operation that exposing photographic paper would cause. With a B&W negative, you can usually get by this way, because you can get the right contrast later using levels and/or curves. However, you are creating more work for yourself by using the Photoshop "Invert" function. Here's why:

 

Photoshop invert performs the mathematical operation 1 - x, where x is the pixel value, scaled to between 0 and 1. The original linear image data, captured by the scanner, has been gamma corrected with the operation y^0.45, where y is the linear data. Thus, after Photoshop inversion, the complete math from linear data to output positive is 1 - y^0.45, where y is the original data from the scanner (scaled between 0 and 1).

 

The "correct" mathematical operation, which occurs when you expose photographic paper, is c/x, where x is intensity of light shining through the negative onto the paper, and c is the chosen "exposure time" of the paper. A value of c=0.1 is about right for visualization purposes. (Dealing with film base color and other factors complicates this slightly, but that's the basic idea)

 

Coincidentally, the functions 0.1/x and 1-x^0.45 look rather similar, even though they are doing different things. This is why the Photoshop "Invert" function looks passable, but requires lots of cleanup with the curves or levels functions. This is also why this method fails utterly when you use the "16-bit linear" output of the scanning software -- because the x^0.45 factor is eliminated, and the function 1-x no longer is close to 0.1/x.

 

My practical advise is to use Vuescan, because it seems to use the correct function as described above. However, I don't particularly like the controls offered by Vuescan (things like paper gamma and exposure time are not available in the interface, leading to clumsy manual control). I'm working on a photoshop plugin that should do the "right thing" and I'll release that soon (for free).