zamazal

And my browser doesn't store the login name and password for photo.net so I have to fill them in each time I want to log in.

Thumbnails are definitely significantly improved, it's no longer necessary to click on a photo to find out what's in it. Another factor might be that one thinks more carefully before clicking on a photo: going back is slow and doesn't return to the same place (both are regressions from v1) and the obvious workaround to open photos in new tabs is also not optimal.

Another important web browser add-on for photo.net is Greasemonkey. The following snippet swaps photos of the day / week / editor's pick with the article grid on the front page. So you can see, together with disabling wasteful elements as suggested above, photo of the day etc. at the top of the page, without scrolling. It's not perfect, but still much better than the original.

 

var container = document.getElementById('wrapper-fullwindow');

var articles = document.evaluate("//div[@class=grid]", container, null, XPathResult.FIRST_ORDERED_NODE_TYPE, null).singleNodeValue;

var photos = document.evaluate("//div[@class=bg-white]", container, null, XPathResult.FIRST_ORDERED_NODE_TYPE, null).singleNodeValue;

articles.parentNode.insertBefore(photos, articles);

Stylish allows setting for a given site or URL, e.g. in Firefox:

 

@-moz-document domain("photo.net") {

* { font-family: "serif" !important; }

}

 

It can be used also for other transformations here, e.g. the following disables some of the useless wasteful photo.net elements:

 

@-moz-document domain("photo.net") {

#container-photographer-cover, #cover-potd, #navstop-discover, #navstop-develop, #navstop-discuss, .h2-teasers, .p-teasers, #photo-zoom-button-container, #photo-zoom-details-container, li.container-photo, h2.marg-top {

display: none;

}

}

I believe you can override the font using Stylish or other web browser add-on.

Yes, this is what I'm talking about. The problem is that the navigation buttons, author's name, title, etc. may, depending on the ratio of the photo, cross the photo area. That is unpleasant.

BTW, is there a way to enter and escape the lightbox with a keyboard?

Another thing: The possibility to display a photo without most of the surrounding content and downsized to the browser window size is a great feature that I missed at the old site. However the remaining surrounding content can be rendered over the photo, which makes the feature much less useful.

 

The wasteful banners and labels everywhere are really annoying. Maybe they can help to attract new users (they would repel me, but they may work differently on others), but I fail to understand how should they help regular users of the site. Would it be possible to add a subscriber benefit to not waste space with those gadgets?

 

I think one can fix a lot himself with userstyles and userscripts, but it would be nice if photo.net could provide a nice layout out of the box. :)

<p>Taking a well focused picture with K-5 is not that easy, unless one uses a manual focus lens on a static subject. K-5 is a great camera, except for autofocus accuracy, it's even "capable" of occasionally misfocusing a static object under good light.</p>

<p>I'm satisfied with Tamron 17-50/2.8 on my K20d. Good picture quality, nice speed and handles front light very well. On the other hand you must learn to use it well (e.g. exposure compensations are needed) and it's infamous for QC problems. If it works well, it's very good for the price.</p>

<p>I develop my C-41 films by hand and it's not hard. But I'm only an amateur and I develop only about dozen rolls per year. Compared to commercial development there are some advantages: I always get back my film and not other person's film, there are less scratches, there are no garbage spots and I don't have to travel anywhere to get my films developed. On the other hand it's time consuming and I sometimes get very annoying spots from drying water. The price is about the same, home processing would be cheaper if I took more pictures. I would use services of a commercial lab for film development if any competent was available in the nearby city (there is not). If there is a reason to make C-41 development at home, it's definitely possible without buying any expensive equipment, assuming you don't need excellent results not provided by an average lab.</p>

<p>Laurentiu, I checked the full-size images. But the softness and loss of detail is well visible even on the reduced samples on pentaxforums.<br>

Andrew, it doesn't look like camera shake to me. When you look at his left eye (on the right in the picture) in the full-size image, the artifacts reveal the possible problem of applying extensive noise reduction. Signs of noise reduction are apparent in the 12,800 image too, but perhaps thanks to increased noise level the algorithm failed to damage the image. Of course, we can't make any serious conclusions from those samples, but it's fun to speculate anyway. :-)</p>

<p>Am I the only who can see (looking at the original images) that the pictures are very good till ISO 1600, but the K5@3200 sample is worse than my K20@1600? See the loss of detail and presence of ugly artifacts, resembling pictures from compact cameras. Perhaps it's just overaggressive noise reduction and K5 can actually perform much better.</p>

<p>I like manual focus and I'd like to own some of the Zeiss lenses. But I'm only a hobbyist and I'm not a rich hobbyist, so I won't get any of them. I don't own any of the current Pentax lenses either, they are expensive too and unlike Zeiss lenses they don't provide usable manual focus and perhaps nor that manufacturing quality. The digital world with its limited-life bodies, changing sensor sizes, limited support for older lenses and uncertain future of K-mount is not worth lens investments for me. Used film lenses market + Tamron/Sigma are much better options for me. So I understand the Zeiss decision.</p>

<p>Ektar 100 is indeed nice for sunsets, it is capable to produce clean pictures capturing the whole dynamic range of the sunset sky.</p><div></div>

<p>Laurentiu, if the image pixels correspond to the sensor pixels of smaller size (we talked about the same size previously), you can't expect "finer looking" noise. So K-7 can't compete to any of the common FF cameras in this respect.<br>

As for sensors of different physical sizes and the same pixel amount, I think it's more difficult. Indeed, you get more light and more noise from *some* noise sources. But one can't expect that a smaller sensor can be just a smaller copy of the larger sensor providing the same image quality. Imagine a small model of a house made of the same materials, its physical properties are clearly different than those of the original building. One would expect that making a smaller sensor is trickier, there may be both technical (e.g. ability to make smaller circuitry) and physical (e.g. increasing influence of quantum effects) limits. The relative physical properties may also be different (not necessarily to the advantage of the larger sensor), e.g. I don't have any idea how voltage, heating, etc. relates to the sensor/pixel size and resulting image quality.<br>

It's also questionable to compare noise of a FF and an APS-C at the same ISO level. You can use larger aperture on an APS-C camera to get the same depth of field as on a FF camera. So you can use lower ISO on the APS-C camera and then the difference in the image quality is not that big as it seems. But again, there are practical limits. Can you buy an equivalent APS-C lens to a 50/1.4 FF lens, i.e. something like a 35/1 lens (not 35/1.4!)? No. And does a DA lens provide the same image quality at aperture 2.8 as a comparable FA lens at aperture 4? Perhaps not. This is were the more important differences may be.<br>

Maybe building a *very* good FF *system* is just easier.</p>

<p>I tried to develop a raw image first to a JPEG image in the camera and then using dcraw + a photo editor. The results are comparable (none of the pictures being clearly better than the other), I had to adjust brightness, increase saturation a lot and apply some USM in the photo editor.</p>

<p>Laurentiu, given the same technology and density the larger sensor has clear advantage. There are more pixels in the larger sensor so the noise is finer, something like finer grain on film. It makes no sense to compare single pixels when they don't cover the same *area* in the final image, you must compare whole images.</p>

<p>Laurentiu, by free software I mean software that comes with source code and that can be freely studied, modified and distributed. AFAIK Pentax software (unlike dcraw) doesn't satisfy any of these conditions and moreover it can't run on my GNU/Linux machine at all, so it's completely useless to me. I'm not saying it's bad, it may be very good, but I simply can't run it.<br>

I use Digikam (www.digikam.org) for postprocessing and managing my photo collection, it's a very nice software. I use Krita for special editing operations the Digikam editor can't do (mostly retouching), Krita isn't that great and user friendly, but it handles 16bit colors and does the job. Indeed, GIMP isn't suitable for photo editing, if you work with 8bit colors, it may be the reason you can't get good results.<br>

Are the Pentax converter results similar to in-camera JPEGs or are they significantly different?</p>

<p>Laurentiu, I use dcraw because it's free software, it's easy to use for me, it's integrated into Digikam and it runs well on my GNU/Linux machine. But it's important to keep in view that dcraw is just a raw converter performing the tricky low level processing and nothing more. Further processing, such as brightness and contrast adjustments or USM, is to be done using other tools, preferably on the 16-bit output from dcraw. I guess the Pentax software (I've never seen it) tries to create a final image. It seems that in your sample Pentax software has applied some additional operations such as clipping and/or contrast increase, saturation increase, perhaps USM and noise reduction. You should be able to receive a similar result from the dcraw 16-bit output, but you have to use an image editor as an additional tool.</p>

<p>So I tried another experiment. I took three pictures of a high contrast scene with my K20D and ISO set to 800 to increase noise: 1. D-range enabled ("D-range"); 2. same exposure, D-range disabled ("0 EV"); 3. half the shutter time, D-range disabled ("-1 EV"). I converted the pictures from RAW using `dcraw -4 -H 1' and applied gamma 2.2 on the result. "D-range" and "-1 EV" were very similar as for brightness and the histogram, with "D-range" shadows slightly brighter (less clipped?). There was a difference in some highlights, but the primary difference was much worse noise in "-1 EV" shadows. "D-range" shadows were much less noisy and with no less detail. "0 EV" was brighter, I applied gamma 1.25 to both "D-range" and "0 EV" to bring their shadow brightness to about the same level as "0 EV" and then compared the results. Highlights in "0 EV" were clipped (no surprise). In shadows, "D-range" was clearly more noisy than "0 EV", but the difference was significantly lower than between "D-range" and "-1 EV".<br>

My conclusions: 1. "-1 EV" is no substitute for "D-range". 2. If "D-range" is just a trick, it's a very good trick (no idea how to reduce shadow noise significantly without visible loss of detail; I'd believe more to the double exposure hypothesis than to the plain underexposure one). 3. D-range can be safely enabled by default for my needs as clipped highlights are much more visible and ugly than somewhat increased noise in deep shadows. 4. I should disable D-range only in those low contrast scenes where shadow noise really matters and when using high ISO.</p>

<p>I've read in some magazine that on the K20D it works by reading highlight pixels from the sensor sooner, before they reach their maximum saturation. I don't know whether it's true nor how they knew it.</p>

<p>OK, Mark, I understand now, it wasn't clear to me that you excluded that whole scratch explicitly. Yes, it's a good idea to treat scratches separately. Thanks for explanation and the example.</p>

<p>Mark, I mean the part of the scratch coming through the flower pots and spoons above the cat's head. It's only a fine scratch, but the point is that dust around it is masked completely while the scratch is still there, demonstrating it's easier to identify dust than scratches. The same can be observed in the example picture given by Les where all dust spots are cleaned perfectly, while some scratches remain visible and some produce ugly cleaning artifacts. This is not a complaint about any of the cleaning processes (both do great recovery jobs), just an observation that I should focus on manual assisted techniques of scratch cleaning rather than trying to improve my fully automated process.</p>

<p>Mark, the scratch is present in the cleaned image (although not much visible) even above the cat. Hand correction of scratches by cloning in non-uniform areas is very tedious for me and I'm often not satisfied with the result -- although the scratch itself is masked, the cloned area may remain somewhat highlighted due to small changes in tonality or so. Perhaps a better approach might be to paint a mask over the scratch by hand and to tune inpainting to do the rest of the work well enough, I'll have to experiment.</p>

<p>Thanks, Mark. One interesting thing is that the long scratch coming through the cat's left eye and the tail root remained unidentified. I think even infrared channel from a C-41 film wouldn't help much here. It doesn't matter on old pictures where such relatively small defects are well tolerable, but it's disturbing on clean pictures. Anyway I still love film for the reasons given above. :-)</p>