Tim_Lookingbill

Miss Mini used to work at Kerrville TX State Hospital nursing patients and cleaning up more bodily fluids than she'ld care to admit. Some really interesting stories giving her a ride home.

I cut my teeth on some of Andrew Rodney's articles he wrote as a technical writer for PEI on profile building for commercial presses I read back in 1998... PEI (PHOTO>Electronic Imaging) (April 1998) at Bookogs This is when I first thought I would have a career as a digital imaging technician. Several years of attempting to teach myself this new field I soon figured out it was an ever changing industry requiring upgrades to both software and hardware and constant retraining. I gave up the pursuit seeing I ran out of money and now find the profession requires a digital imaging science degree which Andrew does not have. Now I and others I've witnessed on other photography websites, not just LuLa, he's doing this bating with one liner arguments (relevant or not) to what amounts to light conversations outlining first hand experience where he hooks the unsuspected into arguing with him using dense color science jargon so he can post links to his YouTube videos and written articles on the subject. Do it once to someone is fine, but constantly following someone online to other websites and posting the same arguments is quite annoying and unnerving.

Thank you, Sandy.

Even if a person disagrees with another on a continuing basis as if he's stalking that person? When does that not come across as courteous and starts getting into harassment? You would not believe the lengths of the threads exacerbated by DigitalDog's arguing points over at LuLa where putting him on ignore greatly reduces the time it takes to scroll through and bypass his input in order to get to read other's opinions. He does this quite often.

Be prepared to have the joy sucked out of this thread topic with any technical input by Andrew Rodney/Digital Dog. He doesn't know how to read the room and will argue over the most inane technical points in an attempt to belittle anyone with a difference of opinion or first hand observations in the field that goes against his expertise. I have him on ignore over at LuLa. And it looks like I'm going to have to put him on ignore over here as well.

Just remembered an option to improve the accuracy of the jpeg histogram to what will show up in the Raw processor shooting Raw when it comes to predicting highlight clipping. I have my incamera jpeg rendering settings set to AdobeRGB output space (it might reduce saturation in each RGB channel when exposing highlights too close to clipping). Also have Contrast/Saturation reduced as much as the settings allow. This will also affect the incamera histogram clipping points. Below is an example of the differences in incamera clipping and what shows up in my Raw processor (ACR 6.7) histogram shooting convection clouds as a test for exposing to the right which I don't recommend getting this close. I got lucky in that I was able to recover the blown highlights. I don't like white empty blobs in detailed fluffy clouds. I toss the image if that happens or clone it out.

Totally agree! Since it hasn't been mentioned there's also the issue of the camera profile both custom and canned that can do some really strange color twists that adjusting WB in the Raw converter can make better or worse. Sometimes not changing the WB and only the profile will make the image better but not accurate like the convection cloud example below. I prefer the golden yellow highlights of the one on the right, a color that one would normally attribute to WB.

Thanks for the heads up on the Ad Blockers but I don't know if they're relevant any longer because a lot of the sites I visit now detect them and alert me to turn them off if I want to view that site's content. And besides that the ads for some reason all of a sudden within the past 6 months or so load very quickly and now don't seem to be much of a bother as before making me less motivated to want to download and install Ad Blockers. If sites want me to view their ads and then make it difficult and resource hogging for my browser and processor, it's THEIR FAULT, NOT MINE! Looks like somebody agreed with me and fixed it.

Sometimes it doesn't always work, though, especially if the white balance in the actual scene causes a channel to clip that the Luminance based histogram doesn't show. Nice to have a camera that shows individual RGB histograms. My Pentax K100D only has luminance based, but thankfully my recently purchased used Pentax K200D has options to show both Luminance or RGB histograms.

I shoot Raw so I always use the camera's histogram when shooting high contrast convection cloud scenes to prevent clipping highlights that proper exposure (or expose to the right) will not guarantee. Clouds have varying intensity throughout their entire shape that the eyes can't see so I back off in this area by underexposing which puts ALL the cloud highlights in the 1/4 zone within the right side of the histogram and Raw converter histogram. I never get blown out blobs of 255RGB white viewing the Raw converter preview processing in ProPhotoRGB color space. It's been working great for me using the histogram this way processing over 1000 Raw images.

White Melina coffee filter. Perfect spectral flatness! But then I'm with Rodeo Joe when shooting outdoors in changing light and WB. I just set the camera to AWB shooting Raw and forget about it. I mean what white balance target are you going to use shooting a sunset? You aren't going to get what you want going that route. More work in post than you'ld ever want to deal with.

Your browser must be color managed. Forgot to add that. In some versions of Firefox it assumes sRGB as default. In other versions you have to turn it on through config something or other.

There's something I need to make understood about those who think the foreground plant shadows are too light. One thing I found out about processing/editing HDR Raw images especially from high bit, high quality captures such as from the Sony is there is a TON of tonal variation captured in deep shadow detail. What this does is proportionately ramp up all other tonal detail that must become lighter. This allows point curve nodes to spread out for more discrete editing of these extra tonal levels that are obscured due to it being dark. The histogram will have more of a triangle shape with a gradually tapering angle toward absolute black. I edited the jpeg in ProPhotoRGB which has a 1.8 gamma encoding representation of the histogram in ACR 6.7 (CS5) Photoshop. This also allows a more gradual tapering toward black in the shadows which creates a veiled effect that agrees with the strong back lighting provided by the background sun obscured by the tree, clouds and fountain spray and additional light provided by the sky light. Images are composed of blocking of lights and darks and mid tones where the shadow of the red plant is one block shape the eye examines in relation to the other blocks of tone. The level of contrast for each block of tone should vary according to which light source is dominant as positioned in the scene. The diffused sky light adds to the veiled effect in the red plant shadow so it should show some lightness and some level of increased contrast because it is closest to the viewer. The histogram for that edited jpeg has tonal levels in the shadows that go all the way to black. You just can't see it because it is in shadows but the contrast intensity should only hint at this. See the Digital Colormeter numbers taken in my browser screengrab...

I have to disagree with what you're seeing, Alan. I've been making mental notes shooting similar scenes in my local park because I tend to make those foreground shadows too dark. I also stopped adding too much clarity to distant tree detail shown to the right of the fountain spray which would always make the scene appear like a miniature diorama. Distant objects should be less sharp and defined compared to foreground objects which should appear with more clarity and sharpness to amplify the appearance of depth. Dutch masters paintings knew this optical effect and used this technique in their paintings to convey depth 100's of years ago. There's also the possibility that our black levels may be different between our displays. Like I indicated previously my display is calibrated and profiled and passes the black level test to where I can see a difference between 2RGB black patch against a 0RGB black field.