martijn_houtman

<p>How about a slide projector? Or indeed a grid modifier.</p>

<p>Neutral looks fine on my calibrated screen. Shoot RAW and do it afterwards anyways.</p>

<p>Yeah, looks like an overly used clarify filter.</p>

<p>To be fair, Patrick, the way Peter read your sentence makes sense. Given, it is a bad interpretation, you'd just better use no double negations ;-)</p>

<p>1680x1050 equals 16:10, which is a normal for a widescreen monitor. I read some good reviews about this monitor, especially for its price. Haven't seen it in real life yet.</p>

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<p>You see, the problem with lightening the jesus figure is that it is way underexposed, showing lots of noise and such. I'd prefer to actually use the two objects that do have good exposure.</p>

<p>My attempt. Maybe dodging (as in lightening with an image editor, not trying to avoid) the jesus figure might be a good idea, but on this PC I am not really able to do it quickly.</p><div></div>

<p>Too bad the Jesus figure is so dark. It would have been very nice if you could lighten it as to make clear what exactly she is praying to. Now, since that appears to be impossible, I would actually darken the whole background to (near?) black, like you almost did (it's still a bit too light for my likings). You should also really use the light that shines on the woman, the one that creates this really nice shadow on her right. Try and accentuate the shadow by making it a spotlight effect. Keep the chandelier, it's really nice. Would love to see the end result, I think your example shows some improvements.</p>

<p>Assuming you have a crop sensor camera, I think the 80-200 should be long enough to make some good shots. The 18-55 will probably not do, because wide-angle shots of sports are seldom interesting in my opinion. The 600 lens sounds like overkill, the 100-400 would be nice to use as well, depending on the type of shots you want. I think the 80-200 will do just fine, as with games like soccer, you want parts of the scenery with the shot, not just the faces of the players, right? With the 80-200 you would be able to stand around the midline and still get good-cropped shots. Just play around and post the results here! :-)</p>

<p>I don't really think the two pieces of software are comparable, as LR is really aimed at photography, while PS is aimed at anything graphical, really. Obviously, PS allows you to do things LR can not, and this may give different results. But I find what I want to do with my photos a lot easier to do with LR than with PS, be it only because of the library thing. And now that LR 2 also has localized adjustments (brush and gradients), I don't have to start PS do do burning/dodging, either. I think it boils down to seeing LR as a darkroom tool to develop my (RAW) photos, and PS to do serious editing.</p>

<p>I would love to see the results you had with PS and were unable to do with LR. LR is an advanced piece of software that fills nearly all my photography needs. There's only a few things I miss, such as lens correction, but for the rest it's the best software I have come across in quite a while.</p>

<p>I notice the same with compact camera's, when you look at the (live view) screen in a darker situation, the exposure goes up, the camera focusses, and the exposure goes back to "normal". My guess would be that the camera goes to an exposure with more contrast in order to make the auto focus more reliable, as it probably focusses by contrast detection.</p>

<p>I am not too fond of all the theoretical differences, even though I find them highly interesting; they just don't really seem all too important when shooting photos. At the risk of sounding pedantic: in the end, the result matters, and good results can be achieved with low-end equipment, too.</p>

<p>What I _do_ notice is that, when post-processing, I rarely have to push things like contrast, saturation and clarity up when a frame is shot with an L lens, which I often have to do when shot with a non-L lens. I have no "scientifical"data to back this up, it's just anecdotical. Just my two cents.</p>

<p>Mine seem to be mapped out as well (30D) with LR. A friend of mine just bought the 5DII, and he has 3 noticeable hot pixels. I think it is actually pretty common, especially with a high pixel count such as this. However, in his LR imports, the hot pixels are very distracting, as they do not get corrected automagically. I wonder if this can be fixed by the internal dust subtraction option (not sure about the exact name) or by using "black frames" in your RAW converter, or even internally in the camera.</p>

<p>Yeah, i've tried using a pinhole lens cap on my 30D and even with a sensor of such size it is quite hard to get a pinhole that maximizes sharpness. I don't think you will ever manage, as Joseph points out really well.</p>

<p>All I know from visiting these countries is that you should NOT trust their scanners, even if they say they're "film-safe". It ruined my photos once. </p>

<p>I stopped my payment because I have no credit-card, so the payment is a bit hard to do for me. Last time a friend of mine paid for me, but I don't want to ask him again. Good thing I can still post from my nonsubscriber account. I will eventually get a credit-card and fulfill my payment :)</p>

<p>Another vote for Tweakers' PriceWatch, it's very handy. I also use kieskeurig.nl, not for their info, but just for their prices.</p>

<p>Furthermore, PC stores I like are Salland Automatisering, Informatique, MyCom and PCL Computers. Maybe not the cheapest, but their service is good.</p>

<p>Your image actually looks pretty good to me, but yeah, the spots/grain/flecks you see is caused by the high iso value. You could have gone for about 1/120th of a second at iso 100. You'd gain a lot more quality: less noise, more sharpness and higher dynamic range. If you want to "save" this image, use some noise canceling software.</p>

<p>D'oh, I am sorry, I mixed the links up, I was looking at the photos Mike linked. I guess it was just too early for me this morning ;-)</p>

<p>Now, about YOUR photos: this is a very nice set of photos, especially considering it is your first attempt. I don't really notice thesharpness Mike is referring to, I think they are fine as they are, and might even look better for the web if they were even a tad bit sharper. I especially like the first few photos with the black background, the others seem more documentary style, but it obviously depends on what you are going for :-)</p>

<p>Carlos actually comes with some good suggestion to use oil. This both smoothens the skin and accentuates the muscles. Maybe the next time?</p>

<p>Very nice work. One thing, though: I find the eyes a bit distracting. You seem to have done some extra whitening and sharpening to them, which is a good idea, but I find this somewhat overdone, they look a bit artificial now. But still, very nice photos!</p>

Thanks, David, looks like a nice tutorial. Some good results there as well. One thing I noticed is

that the URL at the bottom gives a 404 (not found): Michael Reichmann's Luminous Landscape Tutorial on

Exposure Blending (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/blended_exposures.shtml%20 is the url,

it's got a space (%20) at the end).

The non-regularity is caused by Moire patterns. If you want this effect to look good on prints, you

should take the DPI into consideration, as Matt hints towards. If you do this on a single pixel basis,

the scanlines will be a single line in printer resolution (assuming the printed image size is 1:1

regarding the image DPI), so you might want to try adding those "TV lines" with a more wide pattern,

i.e. more-than-one-pixel-wide lines. To get this right, you will have to do some maths.

Joe, I too had this problem, and in my case it was always a faulty CF card. It's gone haywire on me

once, and I noticed some pictures came out bad after that more often. I just threw the card away and

bought a new one, just because I did not trust it anymore.

<p>

Adobe's security is tight. We own a couple of licenses for Adobe software and have more problems with it than we would have with "pirated" versions, activating, deactivating, too many instances running and such. I know this is a "problem between chair and computer" eventually, but we are trying hard to do the legal thing and still get "punished" for it.

</p>

<p>

Anyhue, your solution should be fine, and I do not think Adobe itself will come and hunt you down for suspecting you doing pirate-ish things. Your solution seems fair and legal to me. If not, screw Adobe, you are taking the effort of doing things legally, that should give you much more credit than those who walk the illegal path.

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