eric_perlberg

I was told by a dealer in London yesterday that Leica digitals don't carry the normal passport warranty from Leica, only one year. I pointedly asked about the D2 and was told it had a one year warranty.

Thanks for jogging my memory on this Max. My life has crossed OpenACS and Phil Greenspun and venture capitalists many times. I almost used ACS for a large project I had programmed and a friend of mine with a huge project contacted Phil after he left Ars Digita post VC funding and got quite an earful. Obviously neither of us used ACS in the end.

 

Anyway, your quite right that its way more than what Tim needs.

I had the opportunity today to look at the same sample shots taken at the same time from the D2, Olympus E1, Sony 828 and Canon 10d (with an L lens). There were 2 photos taken by each camera on a tripod at the lowest ISO and 1 photo taken by each cam at ISO 400.

 

At ISO 100 the D2 was IMO the best though the 10D was close. The D2 had more definition and was sharper and had better tonality. The difference may have been down to in camera sharpening but all the people involved felt that the D2 would be our first pick of cameras (before we knew which camera had taken which photo). The noise on the Sony was clearly worse than the others and the E1 wasn't as sharp and had additionally some weird problems with colour balance which I hadn't seen on other E1 photos. None of the images had been run through photoshop, just printed straight from the camera.

 

At 400 ISO the D2 was superficially the best image but had some CA on limbs of a tree against the sky which the Canon didn't have. The D2 also had more noise and less detail in the shadow areas than the canon. It looked to me that the D2 noise at 400 ISO was not dissimmilar to what you'd see with 400 ISO film. The others didn't measure up. The sony was horrid with noise you could see at 20 paces. I've seen good images from the sony at low ISO but at 400 it was really bad.

 

I also had a brief chance to try the D2. It's a unique camera at least until the digital M lens cams start showing up. The LCD screen was big and bright, better than my 300D. I couldn't comment on the EVF and couldn't figure out how to use the EVF enlarger. I definately liked what seemed to be a realtime histogram readout in the viewfinder where ever you point the camera. If the D2 cost £1000 I'd have bought it on the spot but at £1900 I'll have to wait to see what else is coming up. Personally I'm now addicted to being able to see my photos immediately after taking them but I know that others love film and its work flow so YMMV.

 

One issue which is important to me is weatherproofing. I don't know how waterproof the D2 is and I'm interested in hearing anything from others relating to this.

Tim, I don't know much about this but I looked into it once. <p><p>

 

Here are a few open source projects:<p>

http://freshmeat.net/projects/photomanager/<p>

http://freshmeat.net/projects/photoshelf/<p>

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gallery<p>

http://sourceforge.net/potm/potm-2003-10.php<p><p>

 

There are many more. Go to source forge or freshmeat and type in their search box photo management.<p>

 

Photo.net runs on the old Ars Digita tcl software which was open source (I'm fairly certain). Redhat bought the rights to this software and has implemented and further developed the Java version. It's now called Redhat CMS and found at their website: www.redhat.com. There must be someway of getting the old tickle based software and then you can run your own photo.net like stuff.

<p>

You should be able to use any of the blogging software to do this too and possibly with less hassle. Moveable type (www.moveabletype.org) is free for non-profits but you may need help setting up the scripts, making your template for the pages,etc. Radio Userland (http://radio.userland.com/) is inexpensive, comes with templates and you can set it up on your own server or have them host your work. The simplist and quickest way to get started for a reasonably inexpensive price is Typepad (www.typepad.com). It will allow your students to post photos and then comment on each other's photos and the whole thing is driven by templates. It's gotten excellent reviews.

 

Sorry about not making the links clickable but I"m too lazy at the moment.

I can't believe anyone has read through this tired old debate about macs and pcs to get to my little ol contribution. But John, it seems to me that you have been bitten by the lust bug. Once bitten, its hard not to spend all of your time making lists, evaluating, deciding, undeciding, making new, more refined lists, boring your friends, going through old mags, etc. It's not about Macs or PCs. It's about a much deeper issue.

 

There's lots of statements above which are blatently wrong or opinion expressed as fact. Regardless of operating system working on a 20inch wide screen monitor is mindbogingly fun (I have a 22 inch cinema display). From a practical point of view, large monitors are very handy at times (lots of menus, multiple pages in a word doc, video work) and ocassionally annoying (losing the cursor, web browsing, more desktop to get untidy) in my experience. YMMV

 

Macs are well supported here in the UK. Software and tech support are available throughout the country at the same rip-off prices we're used to with everything else.

 

Owning both a Mac and PC and all the latest software, my opinion based on real-world experience is that neither will make you a better photographer. Enjoy your 10D.

 

Eric

Chad,

 

I realise you're scanning MF on the 9000 but what's your sense of the speed improvement over the 4000?

 

cheers,

Eric

Like you Vale, I've worked in a few visual media; etching, watercolour, acrylics, website design, typography and photography. I've always found that the nature of the equipment and materials both constrain my options and contradictoraly open up new creative possiblities for me. I find the same within cameras and between digital and film. I shoot differently with my rangefinder cameras than I do with my SLRs. I shoot differently with my film and digital SLR. I shoot differently with my xpan (panoramic camera) than I do with my 35format cameras. I should say I shoot and *think* differently in each case even with similar external objects that are the focus of my work.

 

To me, photography is about abstracting from a very dynamic world, an image which is static in time but speaks about larger universal issues. That photo equipment, materials and processes have their limitations seem no different to me than the limitations of what you can and can't do with guache, acrylics, dreamweaver, deep bite etching etc.

Cheers Chip, I'll download the demos and give a try. Best, Eric

CMYK is Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. This colour space is used in the world of printing presses where the four inks which go to make up all the other colours are... CMYK. All of your brochures, books, magazines, CD covers etc which are printed in colour are really printed with tiny dots of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink dots in patterns which help simulate various colours. This colour space is pretty restricted but considering what's going on, its pretty incredible. Despite the fact that your inkjet printer at home has inks called cyan, magenta, yellow and black and probably a few others like light black or "photo magenta" your home printer does not print as a CMYK printer. Therefore, unless you are a professional graphic designer doing layout work, or a photographer supplying photos to a graphic designer who is doing layout work, you won't need to use this colour space.

 

RGB is Red, Green and Blue and is a colour space where all colours are created out of Red Green and Blue ink or light. Your inkjet printer and your monitor are both RGB devices. Your printer obviously has other ink colours but the drivers are based on how red, green and blue work together to model all the other colours. sRGB and AdobeRGB and ProPhotoRGB are all models which are based on how Red Green and Blue create colour. They differ on how many colours they include and the number of shades involved. sRGB is the smallest and least desireable colour space from a photographers point of view and ProPhotoRGB is the largest space with the most number of inbetween shades. AdobeRGB lies somewhere in between. Choose too small a colour gamut and you clip colours in the original. Choose too large a colour gamut for a particular photo and you get banding betweeen colour gradations because there are missing steps from the model's point of view in your image between hues. With the advent of 16bit colour in Photoshop you'll be hearing more about ProPhotoRGB

 

LAB colour is very different. I believe, but am not sure that this derived from scientific work in the 30s on vision and perception of colour and forms the foundation of colour management theory and in fact the current accepted theory of how our retinas perceive colour. In any case LAB colour considers colour along an L scale for lightness-darkness, an intersecting scale of "a" of red-green and another scale "b" of blue-yellow. This matches our cones which come in 3 "flavours", receptors which respond to darkness-lightness, others which respond to blue-yellow and yet others which respond to red-green.

HTH

 

Apparently (according to naturescape.net) ACR has colour problems on PCs but not on Macs (I work on a Mac) which would explain why I haven't seen these ACR colour problems and perhaps why you have. I can see how batch processing is useful if you are working in a studio in which you have controlled lighting from shot to shot. I don't at the moment see how it would be beneficial for outdoor "live" situations (as oppossed to controlled commercial shooting) where every shot is different. I watched the tutorial movies at Phase One and the only tool I saw which seemed an advantage over ACR was the gray balancer tool. Do you see any other advantages?

Along the Thames near Blackfriers in London<div></div>

HTH

 

Thanks for the points, I haven't tried YARC+ or C1 though I might download the trials and give a try. Personally I don't do batch work so that issue isn't a an issue for me. Nor have I noticed the colour shift problems or artifacts in dark areas, perhaps because I haven't tried the other two raw packages I have nothing to to compare ACR with. C1 is certainly a popular alternative from what I read but at quite an unpopular price. If you're doing batches as you do, it sounds like a useful solution.

 

I do hope my post was relavent to the original questioner as to what to do in Photoshop and what to do in ACR from the point of view of the chap who designed photoshop and ACR and a prominent photographer who field tested ACR.

 

Cheers,

Eric

<div></div>

M6 + provia 400 pushed 2 to 3 stops + tri-elmar (28/35/50 f4). Huge versatility in a compact package made even more versatile with b/w conversion techniques in Photoshop. It's far from perfect but its usable almost any time, anywhere and means a camera can travel with me where ever I go. If we had sun in the winter in the UK I'd use a different set-up but we v. rarely do.

Shad Thames in front of restaurant on gray Saturday evening.<div></div>

According to Jeff Schewe (photographer and Photoshop Alpha tester), in conversations with Thomas Knoll (he is one of the architects of Photoshop and Photoshop CR and an avid photographer himself) White Balance (temp and tint) and exposure can't be done in Photoshop. Shadows is the same as moving the black clipping point in curves and the rest on the first tab are analogous to their namesakes in photoshop but where put in CR because the adjustment would happen before translation to 8bit images in previous versions of Photoshop (before 16bit manipulation became as usable as it currently is). The sharpening and noise reduction tools mimic things which can be done in photoshop and Schewe points out that in CR they are global adjustments which can be better controlled in Photoshop with masking etc to make sure each part of the image gets the work it needs and not just gobal sharpening, noise reduction, etc.

 

The above and more is available at imagingreview.com which is an excellent fee based discussion board run by several colour management gurus.

 

I would add one more point for Adobe CR. In the bottom left there is a dropdown menu for choosing colour gamut. Although the current rule of thumb is to use Adobe RGB as one's colour space, there is now talk among the knowing of using ProPhotoRGB because it has a larger colour gamut than AdobeRGB and now that Photoshop can do more work in 16bit, ProPhoto can be a more appropriate colour space to work in. So one of the nice things about the colour historgram at the top right is that you can try different colour spaces and see if any of the colours in the image are clipping in AdobeRGB and not clipping in ProPhotoRGB.

 

There are other issues involved with choosing a colour space but 16bit work is going to change the rules of the game for advanced Photoshop users

 

So a plausable general workflow in ACR is to set the colour space and use White Point and Exposure and then use only things which would take you more time than you're willing to put in in Photoshop like Chromatic Aberration removal and do all other adjustments in Photoshop proper.

I for one am really tired of every thread in the Leica forum ending as a low grade name calling exchange between Jay and others.

 

It's really tedious

 

Please don't react to Jay's comments if you don't like them. You haven't changed his behaviour but you have changed the enjoyability of these forums.

 

Moderators, please consider stepping in and making a rule against personal attack posts.

Just a thought Greg, which I haven't thought through. I wonder if you're printer spooler is running out of memory and choking on the larger Tiff files. .psd might help as they are smaller. Admittedly a slow dell laptop is not the perfect tool for the job.

 

The problem with JPEGs is that every time you open and save them, you lose information. It's like making photocopys of photocopys. If you're going to the trouble of scanning at 4000dpi JPEGs are not a good solution.

 

I hearby decree that we're all rich and can afford the kit we want.

It's ironic Jeffrey that I keep finding daylight bulbs advertised in the UK under embroidary and sewing.

 

Anyway I found this link for solux and you can see the CRI is 98 or 99!

 

http://www.solux.net/

 

Also, GTI has an excellent pdf which covers the technical specification of why/how all of this works. There is an ISO standard: ISO 3664:2000 which describes how and why one needs to use 5000k light and control lamp intensity/monitor intensity. Unfortunately I downloaded it from imagingreview.com and that requires (I think) membership before you can see it. But its a GTI document (they make viewing booths).

As long as you have software which can use PSD files, and more and more can use native PSD files, then PSD is the preferred option. As you say, TIFF files are considerably larger with no extra advantage other than compatibility with other software, particularly desktop publishing.

 

Greg, in 20+ years of professional graphics work, I have never heard of a printer which is specific to a file type or which won't accept a file type. JPEGs are a destructive (lossy) file format and hopefully you're not archiving your work in JPEGs.

Noah, as I mentioned, I'm also looking for an inexpensive solution to this lighting issue. I did some reading at imagereview.com. The Ott lamp comes in several flavours (5000k, 6500k and others) and various people had negative statements to make about it. The general consensus from what I read was that the best/cheapish solution was Solux lamps. You can do google search for suppliers of solux, there are many. The Solux are available as bulbs and came at different temps and wattages and the one recommended was the 4700K bulb which is slightly warmer than 5000k but has a very high CRI which is its purity rating. You can buy this as a bulb or as one of several styles of lamp ranging from clip on to floor standing. There is a dimmer but the problem with it is that it dims and also changes the colour temp of the bulb and it wasn't recommended. But the bottom line was that its cheap and close enough and this from the likes of Andy Rodney and Bruce Fraser who are among the real central chaps in the field.

 

The brightness issue you mentioned is simply this. The intensity of the light of either the monitor or the 5000k bulb affects the apparent intensity of a colour either on your monitor or the print. So if your monitor is brighter than your 5000k bulb the colours on your monitor will look brighter than your prints, and vice versa. So the idea here is to get them even. The cheap compromise is to move the lamp further from the print to equalise the "brightness". Is this a good solution if you're doing colour critical professional work? No. Are you? No.

 

So what I'm leaning towards right now as a result of my research is to buy a solux bulb and cheap lamp and see how things go from there. As I said, you are always going to have to make a compromise somewhere.

 

Lastly, don't forget that all of these points aren't about looking at the print in the environment in which it will be seen and whether or not it will look good in that environment. These endless colour management points are about trying to create the right environment for analysing the closeness of the print to what you saw on your monitor.

These might help:

http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/11791.html

 

http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/12054.html

Benoît

 

If the control is backlighting, it won't affect your profile and you can set it at what you want. I'm not sure why you think its backlighting and not brightness. On my 23" cinema display the only control I have is brightness. Gretag Macbeth (I use their calibration equipment) says that the profile is specific to the brightness level when you create the profile and changing brightness means the profile is no longer accurate, its specific to the brightness at which it was created.

 

Eric

<i>Seriously, what really winds me up is when people who should know better imply that a perfectly calibrated and profiled system will automatically result in the perfect print.</i><p>

 

Yes, not only will a perfectly profiled system not automatically result in a perfect print, its a physical impossiblity to have a perfect match between monitor and proof, a point I've emphatically made many times at photo.net if you care to check up on my recent posts. I also carefully avoid the implication at my business and all my customers know that I caution them against this kind of thinking.

<p>

And the reason I started Stone Quay Studio profiles is because I wanted to have an inexpensive alternative here in the UK, a kind of profiling for the rest of us like Cathy's Profiles in the US precisely because I feel that colour management is an overhyped and over priced but valuable tool. So I'm totally with you on this.

<p>

The point I've made now 3 times on this page and the only point I'm trying to make is that if you ask yourself ...does my print accurately look like what it looked like on the monitor (notice the absence of the word exactly but accurate is what you will get) you need to view the print under (pure) 5000k light.<p>

 

And I tried to make this point in answer to several comments about other colour temperature lamps/light or even flourescents which seem to be a good 5000k source on the surface of the issue but turn out not to be so satisfactory in terms of answering the question. I pointed out that not only is colour temperature an important factor but also equal luminosity is critical. And I pointed out that unless one becomes anal about things, you wind up making compromises which at some point everyone has to make. At which point I at least, and you also apparently, get back to the thing we love which is creating visions.

<p>

Given the above, I still don't see why you're all wound up with emotion at me. By implication, in your last post you're putting words in my mouth by talking about unspecified profilers who promise the world and should know better. Well since I'm the only profiler around in this thread and since you engaged me earlier, it does seem you're implying this about me. I don't argue anywhere that you/anyone should not judge the quality of the print by one's artistic eye which in your case is really excellent in my opinion. And even without an art school education, I do the same although I have lots more to learn.

 

They're simply two separate issues. Issue one, when is a print good? You have that down pat. You have my respect. But its not the issue which was asked here. Issue two which is the issue of this discussion thread, what is a good light for viewing prints in the context of a digital darkroom and that is the question I've tried to answer. And your answer about your eye being the final judge has nothing to do with the question.

<p>

Further, I do argue that if you want to use a highly complex tool like a computer colour management system, you need to understand it and do it right or you add complications which quickly lead to the same frustration you were trying to avoid by taking the system on in the first place.

Keith

 

I'm not sure what your agenda here is. In answer to the poster's question, I wrote a professional answer. It's something I know about. Are you suggesting that I'm wrong or are you just unhappy with the answer to the question.

 

If you're looking for my photographic images, you can find them at my personal web site www.kiiquu.com. If you read my bio, you would have seen that.

 

If you want to play my dog is bigger than your dog, I'm happy to say that I've looked at your photography before and I think its stunning. You obviously know what you're doing with a camera. But I don't think you're much of an expert on computer colour management. That's what the original poster asked about. That's what I wrote about.

 

Lastly, when it comes to making friends and influencing others you seem to get a kind of kick in sinisterly suggestive innuendo. Not flattering for a guy who takes such pretty pictures.