paddler4

I vaguely remember that years ago, after years of heavy use, one of my three Kenko tubes got loose and no longer had a reliable connection. I replaced the set, so now I have 5....

Notice that the letters are not all in focus. This is not surprising: the label is curved, and DOF is razor thin at these distances. The only solutions are to stop the lens down or focus stack. If you stop the lens down, you are likely to find that the increased appearance of sharpness from having everything in focus far more than offsets any loss of sharpness from diffraction.

For example, this shot was taken at f/13 nominal with a 100mm macro lens and a 36mm extension. The effective f stop was much smaller, so diffraction already started. I didn't calculate, but as a rough rule of thumb, this is an effective f/stop of at least f/26. However, the image looks sharp.

Usually, the reason would be low light. However, I can't answer why you have a problem with 12+20 but not with 36mm. My guess is that the electrical contact is weak and that having two tubes makes this worse.

yes, but then again, there are more people than at any time in history 😁

What I think is the big change is the number of pictures per person. the combination of digital and cell phone cameras has had a huge effect on the number of photos taken. 

Maybe simpler to shoot digital and put the weed to other uses.

Yes, that's one reason I ruled out the R7. No really good RF-S lenses at the time. Now we have to wait to see whether Canon will license third party RF lenses too.

On 4/4/2024 at 1:57 PM, Robin Smith said:

According to Adobe my graphics card is OK and I have sufficient RAM. I guess it is a matter of what counts as OK I can do photoediting, but it is slow and crashes are not infrequent. Since otherwise the machine is fine I conclude that it the CPU is no longer really up to the task. It is 11 years old.

Also, lots of files related to the OS could be either out of date or corrupted.  You could run the Windows file system checker and let it repair what it finds, https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/use-the-system-file-checker-tool-to-repair-missing-or-corrupted-system-files-79aa86cb-ca52-166a-92a3-966e85d4094e. that might not help, but it's easy enough to try.

On 3/29/2024 at 11:03 AM, Robin Smith said:

Up until the Windows 11 I never had any issue with LR/PS, but my PC is too old to be upgraded to Windows 11, and I think this may be the issue with the LR classic that is now updated to, presumably, run best on Windows 11. I think that the processing speed has become inadequate and as a result I get frequent crashes. I need to get a new machine.

My old windows machine became cranky because the graphics card was not sufficient for current Adobe programs. I upgraded to a new computer with Windows 10 in June 2022 and stayed on it only Sept 2023 because that was still what my university was using. I had zero problems with Adobe under Windows 10 after getting a new computer. The transition to Windows 11 was seamless.

sorry, i misunderstood.

You might get more answers in the wet darkroom forum. This is the forum for digital darkroom work.

It depends on what you shoot. For me, having the 70-105mm range and the IS trumps the difference in optical quality. I had both the EF versions and agree that the II is not greatly better than the I, but it did avoid zoom creep. I now use an RF 24-105, and it's one of my two most used lenses.

In this case, more than good enough, if it's in mint condition. The original 70-200 f/4 L was a superb lens.

Given how easy uninstalling and reinstalling adobe products is now that it's a subscription model, sometimes the simplest thing to do with a problem that won't go away is to uninstall and reinstall

By 1:4, do you mean f/4? If so:

I've owned both the first generation and the second generation 70-200 f/4 L lenses. Both are excellent. The current II is truly a superb lens. In fact, I bought it because there was a rumor that it was one of the EF lenses that would be discontinued, and I wanted to buy one before they disappeared. That apparently didn't happen; they are still available at retailers. It's so good that I kept it when I switched to mirrorless and use it with an RF adapter. 

it is NOT the case that the f/2.8 is a better lens. It's just one stop faster. And the cost of that, when I bought mine (the RF specs are different) was that the f/2.8 was twice the price, twice the weight, and a lot bulkier. On a telephoto, I never need the slightly narrower DOF f/2.8 offers, and in the very rare cases where I need the extra stop, I just boost ISO by one stop. On modern cameras, a one stop increase in ISO is not a big deal. So for me, the f/4 was clearly the superior choice. I've had one or the other of these lenses for a long time, probably well over a decade, and I've never once regretted not buying the f/2.8. 

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I am all for getting rid of the mechanical shutter but I don't really feel I would need the global shutter.

An electronic, non-global shutter can create rolling shutter artifacts when the subject is fast moving. The point of the global shutter is to allow a fully electronic shutter without rolling shutter artifacts. I don't have this problem, but it can be avoided by using electronic first curtain shutter, which is fast enough for anything I do. See https://photographylife.com/mechanical-electronic-shutter-efcs

I don't know why people are getting so excited by this. I think the article's title is foolish and misleading. A global shutter will change photography for a very, very small subset of photographers, and for them, this is a big deal. For the rest of us, it provides no benefit at all and exacts a price in other aspects of image quality. I have zero use for a global shutter, and while I know a lot of photographers, I can't think of one who would benefit from this. For people who photograph car races and the like, maybe. And if you read about this, you'll see that Sony had to make other compromises to accomplish this. Bottom line is that if this were offered as an option for the camera I recently bought, I wouldn't have bought it.

Remember what Ansel Adams said: the most important piece of photographic equipment is the 12 inches behind the viewfinder.

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 it's useful and important to have GPUs that follows Adobe requirements. Sadly many Windows machines don't. 

Certainly true. Lots of Windows and Linux machines don't match Adobe requirements. I had to specify a GPU when I ordered my current desktop. OOH, Adobe is virtually the sole software vendor for which I have ever found that true, and I switched away from Apple after the Apple II. The only other example I can think of is that one of the software packages I use holds your entire database in memory and therefore required specific amounts of memory to be able to handle large databases, but that had nothing to do with the PC architecture. People in my group ended up using a compute server farm running Linux rather than their Macs or PCs for really big jobs.

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the latest LR classic is very crash prone, but again this may well be my machine

I can only speak from my experience, that's not been my experience. I can't recollect the last crash I've had with LR Classic (always kept up to date) on either my desktop or my laptop. Neither is super high end, but both are only a few years old, and the desktop meets Adobe's listed requirements.

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Again, just check the Adobe user-to-user forums for those speaking of GPU issues, Mac vs. Windows

Seems to me that one has to take into account market share, as Robin noted. Also, a lot of the PC GPU problems are from people who haven't checked to make sure their machines meet Adobe requirements. 

20 hours ago, conrad_hoffman said:

I set my interval to "never" because my OCD ensures that it will get done more often than necessary no matter what.  Still trying to grasp some things- If I profile a monitor to a smaller gamut than the monitor is capable of, does that profile insure that no colors outside the specified gamut will be displayed? Similarly, if the monitor is close to sRGB but doesn't quite match, is "native" a better choice than "sRGB"?

I'd post this in the digital darkroom forum. The Dog is the person to give you the best answer. However, not being an expert, I'll take a stab at it:

1. yes

2. I suspect this depends on the monitor, but I would calibrate it to sRGB, which is a standard, unlike the characteristics of your particular monitor.

I use a NEC wide gamut monitor, the same model Dog uses, and NEC advises first calibrating the monitor and then using the full native gamut. I think that's because a printer isn't exactly Adobe RGB, and the idea is to get the best possible rendition and then let the ICC and softproofing narrow it if need be. But really, ask Dog. He's the expert.

I don't take huge numbers of photographs with my digital cameras, but I take a lot more than I did with my film cameras. And that's a good thing. I feel free to experiment and take chances without worrying about cost or the number of frames I had left in my camera or my bag. And I can essentially change "films" with the press of a button. No more stopping everything to take out a changing bag, carefully rewinding just enough, inserting another roll, etc.)

The complexity of modern digital cameras is unavoidable: the manufacturers have to spread the costs of development over a wide variety of potential buyers. I don't take videos with my digital cameras, so all of the increasingly sophisticated video capabilities are wasted. I don't even understand some of them. Doesn't bother me in the slightest because I simply ignore those features. They never get in the way of doing what I want to do.

The only time I find the complexity a nuisance is when I buy a new camera and have to spend a few hours figuring out how it works, how to customize it for my needs, and what I can ignore.

What's omitted from this discussion, if I'm not missing something, is the vastly greater control digital gives us. I can do things that I was incapable of doing with analog (e.g., focus stacking), and I can do others vastly more easily and better (tonality adjustments, sharpening, color adjustments, yada yada). I loved my old FTb, which I still have, but I haven't shot a single roll of film since I bought my first DSLR years ago,.

Re people who use digital to shoot far too many images: not my problem. Unlike, say, the many people who misuse the capabilities of cars, they pose no danger. 

18 hours ago, hjoseph7 said:

The Monitor Calibration tool I use is SpectraView II which prompts me to calibrate my monitor every so often(too often). If I was doing a lot of printing, I guess these prompts would come in handy, but since I use my computer for other purposes such as: cooking recipes, youtube videos, The news, sports, various forums, these prompts to calibrate my monitor are very annoying. I guess that when my next printing session comes around, I will calibrate my monitor using Spectra View, but right now I'm not motivated to do so.  When photography become too complicated and technical, then it's not Photography anymore, it's Math.  Sorry I could not be of much help...

Doesn't take any math to recalibrate a monitor. Just a little bit of patience.

I use an X-Rite, but it has the same issue: by default, it prompts  me too early. In the days of CRTs, calibration apparently went off kilter fairly quickly. It doesn't seem to with modern displays, at least the ones I've had. So, I set the software to remind me less often, and then I ignore it until I'm ready to spend the time doing it.

1 hour ago, digitaldog said:

If you can still find one, a smart display system like the SpectraView PA271Q. 

that's what I have, and I love it, but they are hard to find--discontinued quite a long time ago. Sharp bought NEC several years ago, and they have substantially reduced the number of wide-gamut monitors they sell.

John--You didn't say what your goal is. In particular, do you print a lot? If you do (I do), then a wide-gamut monitor like the NEC is a real help. If you display only online, I don't think you'll find it much of an advantage, since most monitors that people viewing your photos will use are at best sRGB.

If you want wide gamut and don't want to spend Eizo-level prices, you might want to look at BenQ. From what I have read and from the reports I've had from users. their quality control has sometimes left something to be desired, but if you get one that's working properly, they are very good for the price.

Not my field, but my impression is that Linux is primarily used for cloud management, which I think it dominates, and for heavy-duty professional work, e.g., statistical analysis of huge datasets, and not all that much for personal computing. I just looked up a couple of the 2023 estimates for desktop market share:

Linux: 3.2%, 2.8%

MacOS: 21.2%, 14.6%

Windows: 68.9%, 70.4%

So not a lot of reason for a company like Adobe to put money into recoding its suite for Linux. The word-around I noted earlier was via a Windows emulation under Linux, not native Linux.

I looked, and there are workarounds to get Adobe products to run under Linux, e.g., https://www.maketecheasier.com/install-adobe-creative-cloud-linux/. However, it's nothing I would want to do.

A very sensible article. I think he could go further. The latest craze, global shutters, isn't just absolutely useless for most of us. It's actually detrimental because of its negative effect on DR. 

Whether any of the new doodads are worthwhile depends on what you do. If you do landscape photography or urban night photography or studio portraits, AI subject detection is useless. If you do candids of kids, which I do, it's actually useful because they don't stay still. I have a much higher keep rate for candids with my R6 II than I had with my 5D IV. However, for most other types of photography I do, that feature is worthless.

His point about the silly resolution race is spot on. Unless you print large or crop severely, it doesn't much matter how much about 20 MP you go. I have printed up to 17 x 22 with cameras that have 22, 24, and 30 MP, and not a single person has ever commented that the photos lack detail. I did exhibit one 11 x 19 that was an 8 MP crop from a 12 MP image, and that one really did take a lot of postprocessing work, but the only comments I've received about the final product have been very positive.

The rule I have tried to enforce on myself--I have to admit, I have enough GAS that I have at times violated it--is that if I can't say what a new piece of gear will allow me to to appreciably better, I shouldn't buy it.

Ricochetrider: you must be using an ad-vulnerable browser without an ad blocker extension. I read the column in Vivaldi with no ad blocker added, but with Disconnect.me installed, and the page was quite clean.