peter_mckone

<p>One of the best bird pictures I've ever seen was taken by an amateur photographer, and he was indeed using a Nikon camera. But the picture was taken about twelve years ago, and the camera probably had a 6 mp sensor. Take a look at old issues of National Geographic, and see if the images look defective. Nobody had 36 mp sensors back then. A long lens and fast autofocus are probably more important.</p>

You could capture a raw image of the whiteboard, and let Adobe Camera Raw correct it. ACR would tell you the temperature and tint. You could use those values to correct other raw images that you shoot with the same lighting.

 

 

I assume you have looked at the "Custom" white balance feature of your camera, where you shoot an image of a neutral gray object, and your camera calculates the temperature and tint, and uses those values to produce in-camera jpegs of subsequent images.

<p>The software on the CD that comes with your camera is quite good at moving raw files from the camera to your computer. After they are on your computer, you can import them into the Elements Organizer, if you want to. Or, you can skip the "import" step and just edit them with the Elements Editor. That's what I do. Some people use the Elements Organizer, or Lightroom, or PhotoShop Bridge to organize their photos, but if you are comfortable with creating directories (Microsoft calls them "folders") and sub-directories, then you don't need to import anything into any Adobe Organizer.</p>

<p>If you buy the 6D now and the lens later, then at that time you'll have a 6D and a 70-200 lens.<br>

If you buy the lens now and a new camera later, then you'll have a 6D model 2 and a 70-200 lens.<br>

Which sound better?</p>

<p>It sounds as if you have a filter somewhere in the light path. There probably is supposed to be an infra-red filter in front of the sensor. Could a wrong part have gotten installed at the factory? I assume you don't have any filters on the lens you are using, but it wouldn't hurt to check. </p>

<p>The sensor itself has the red and green and blue pixels in a well-defined pattern. If the factory got an experimental sensor with a different pattern, the colors would be wrong. I admit that seems pretty unlikely.</p>

<p>Perhaps the card got too close to a magnet or a big electric motor?</p>

If Nikon cameras make better images, then your choice (and mine and everyone else's) would be simple, and Canon's sales would drop to near zero. Are you sure you aren't being fooled by the default settings of the in-camera jpeg processing? All of those things can be changed in Photoshop, and if you're serious about photography, then you're probably doing that already. It is true that the D800 has less noise in the very darkest parts of your images, but your eye doesn't expect to see details in deep shadows, and the D800 is not in your budget anyway.

Connection problems on computers are often caused by the computer trying to use an expired IP address. Instead of rebooting, try disabling and re-enabling your wireless hardware. On the other than, rebooting recovers memory that has been lost due to "memory leaks", so rebooting is good too. Sorry, I don't have any experience with camera / cell phone links.

<p>Is it possible that this is a limitation of older versions of EOS Utility, and that it has been corrected in a newer version? Are you using a fairly recent version of EOS Utility?</p>

<p>I download photos to my local disk, and then run a backup program to copy the files to my network disk. This guarantees that I won't lose the photos when the NAS disk dies.</p>

How about donating it? Your local junior college probably has a photography instructor who knows a deserving recipient.

<p>DPP can show you which focus point was active on your raw file.</p>

Using the software that came with your camera, you can add you name to the exif data. Then anyone who downloads an image from the camera will know it belongs to you.

 

Ask the Craigslist seller if he has the manual and disks that came with the camera. If he does, then it probably isn't yours.

<p>Canon knows that 6D users have Photoshop. There's probably some reason that Canon cameras still don't have an option to create DNG files, but I can't figure out what it is. Until then, you can use DPP to convert to a (quite large) 16-bit tiff, and then process it "as raw" in CS4, or whatever.</p>

<p>1. It would be nice if Canon's raw files didn't change every time they release a new camera. Or if a new raw file format really is necessary, DPP should have a "convert to Adobe DNG" function. DPP does output TIFF files, which may be just as good as raw files, only larger.</p>

<p>2.If you just want the newest raw converter, you can save some money by buying Adobe Elements for less than $100. Use Elements to make a jpeg (or PSD), and then edit it using your full version of CS5, or whatever. You may even find that Elements does everything you need.</p>

<p>Portrait mode is intended for taking a picture of one person, with the background intentionally out of focus. This isn't what you want. Instead, try AV mode and set the aperture to f8 or f12. Now aim at your target group, press the shutter button half way down, and notice the shutter speed that the camera calculates. If the shutter is open too long, people will move, and you'll get a blurry photo. If the exposure time is less than 1/100, increase the ISO setting (but preferably not above 1600) and try again.</p>

<p>I take it that your other 5D doesn't behave this way. The only difference I can think of is the firmware. Are both cameras on the same version?</p>

<p>A 300 mm lens will give you an adequate photo of the moon, but to see much detail, you really need 500 mm. I suggest f12 at 1/80 second. Theoretically, it seems like you might not need a tripod, but I wouldn't count on it. The hard part is focusing. I suggest doing it ahead-of-time. While the sun is still shining, focus on a distant mountain top, and then set the lens to manual focus, so it won't change. When the moon is near the horizon, you won't get a sharp image. The light passes through too much atmosphere. Wait until a couple hours after it rises.</p>

<p>Did you format the cards after the first job? Or just delete the images? If you just deleted the images, you might be able to recover any that weren't overwritten by running a program that analyzes the free space on the card, looking for files that appear to be jpeg or raw images. At least that's what you would do if the files were on a hard drive. I don't know if memory cards are organized like disks, but I don't see why they wouldn't be.</p>

<p>Photoshop is good at replacing blown out skies. I use a method from a Scott Kelby book. You open another photo with good sky, copy it to the clipboard, select the bad sky in you main image, create a blank layer, and edit/copy selection from clipboard. If you don't have the Kelby book, Google "Photoshop replace sky". There are many tutorials online.</p>

<p>If the photo doesn't include any neutral gray, it's hard for any camera to adjust white balance. Its best chance is to "know" what objects like sky or grass "should" look like, and adjust accordingly. But trinkets under odd lighting in a studio? How can any camera get that right?</p>

<p>Include a gray card in one of your photos. Then, either in Elements or DPP, when doing the raw conversion, click on the gray area to set the white balance. See if you are satisfied with the color. If not, try moving the tint slider afterwards.</p>

<p>I think ACR saves its adjustments in a separate file, with suffix .xmp. Make sure your directory isn't read-only.</p>

<p>It seems like you should be able to make the corrections you want in DPP, then save as 16-bit tiff, and open the tiff file "as raw" in Photoshhop Camera Raw. I haven't tried this yet. </p>

<p>Have you tried the f 1.8 50 mm "plastic fantastic"?</p>

<p>DPP is good when you don't need local editing.</p>

<p>I'm a big fan of Photoshop Elements. It has almost all of Photoshop's features for less than a hundred dollars.</p>

<p>Sometimes I use Lightroom (version 2), but it is often painfully slow to respond to mouse clicks. I think it is performing background tasks, like making thumbnails of photos that I don't intend to look at.</p>

<p> </p>