paddler4

PS: In case you are new to B&W conversion, this is what I meant by tonality controls by color. This particular version is in Lightroom, but any conversion software worth considering should have something similar. (Some have fewer color choices.) It allows you to darken or lighten pixels that are of any given color in the unconverted original--e.g., to darken a sky, much as us old folks used to do back in the day with a red filter. The little circle in the top left of the mix panel is particularly useful. It's one of Lightroom's "targeted adjustment tools". Click on that, then place the cursor any place you want in the image, and drag up (to lighten) or down (to darken). It will mix the the sliders based on the mix of colors in that area of the image.

I like Lightroom for the basic B&W conversion because it's entirely nondestrctive and reversible, has very good controls for changing tonality by color (like using filters in the old days, but far more flexible and powerful), allows virtual copies so that you can have several processing approaches side by side, and seamlessly integrates with Photoshop when you need more powerful editing. Silver Efex has a lot of effects, in particular, film emulations. Silver Efex also works as a plug-in to lightroom and photoshop.I don't use Silver Efex much anymore, but when I use any Nik filters, I use them as plug-ins toward the end of the editing process.

Right. The faded appearance was therefore not a concern for me. I'm used to it. My concern was solely color rendition, particularly yellow-green

Thanks for the comments, but the issue I initially pointed out is not one of poor tonal response. The problem is that in some images, greens have too much of a yellow cast, not that they are too green. For example, look at the bottom tree foliage in this one, which is raw read into LR with no adjustments; That color would have been reasonable in May, but not at the end of July. Having now gone over a bunch of drone images taken under different circumstances, I'm pretty much convinced that Ed was right that this is just a poor AWB result. I do have a few images where tweaking the green in the calibration panel also helps. The problem is resolved, I think.

Bill, Thanks for the comments. Some of the drone images I've captured have been somewhat flat. If necessary, I deal with the saturation issue by doing at least some of the contrast and other tonality adjustments with a luminosity blend mode in Photoshop. That works solely on luminosity, so you can adjust contrast as much as you want without having any effect on saturation. Saturation and WB are very different things. The WB problem I have noticed is primarily too much yellow mixed with greens. Increasing contrast or saturation wouldn't solve that problem. That's why I originally played with calibration, but Ed was right: it's a WB problem. The images I posted have a pretty mild case of this problem. Some of the other images I've taken have had greens that are quite far off. Dan

I have had both the original 24-105 and the II. The II has a zoom lock to eliminate zoom creep when walking around. I would find it very hard give up the 24-105 for a 24-70 even though I usually carry a 70-200. Given what I shoot, I would be changing lenses all the time if I had the 24-70. I find 24-105 to be an ideal range for a walk-around lens. But YMMV; it depends on what you shoot. I looked long and hard at the 24-70 f/4 and decided in the end that it is very nearly a wash in terms of image quality. They just have different weaknesses at different focal lengths. While I would like a 24-105 that is better optically, the fact is that the quality of the 24-105 has never been a problem for me, even printing as large as 17 x 22 (roughly A2). The Lightroom lens profile does a very good job of correcting some of the lens's flaws. Another advantage for me--although it comes into play much less often--is that when I want reach, I can carry the 24-105 and 100-400 f/4.5-5.6, leaving the 70-200 at home, and have no gap in FL.

I had a similar experience with cataract surgery because the cataract itself has a yellowish tint. Whites looked blue-ish for a short time. I'll have to try with more controlled colors, but I just did some edits that suggest that you're right: it's more likely a WB problem than a green calibration channel. Here's an unedited shot fairly late in the summer, so the greens should not be this yellowish: Now, here's the image with WB adjusted using the tent at the lower right as the target: The change on the blue-yellow axis is very small--slightly more blue--and is smaller than I noticed in some other photos. But there is also a larger shift from magenta to green. Finally, here's the original with the green channel pulled to +40 in Lightroom and no adjustment via the WB control. The change in the greens is more extreme, probably overdone. But the walkway has a clear magenta cast, which is not accurate. So the bottom line seems to be a not terribly good AWB.

Andrew, Thanks very much dan

This is a really arcane question, but I'm guessing that at least one person here knows the answer. I've searched in vain for an explanation from Adobe. As I understand it, LR maps raw data to a proprietary variant of ProPhoto called Melissa. The image stays in that color space until one exports it, moves it into Photoshop or another external editor, prints it, or whatever. ACR has a menu that allows converting to other color spaces, including Lab. LR lacks this. So, here are the disagreements: 1. Does that ACR menu have any bearing on the internal color working space, or does it use the same working space as LR, only mapping to another space, such as lab, when moving the image out of the application into photoshop? 2. If you want to work in Lab in Photoshop, choosing the Lab option in ACR would open the image as a base layer in Lab in Photoshop. Coming from LR, one would have to open the image in Photoshop in whatever working space one selects, let's assume ProPhoto to keep things simple, and then convert the base layer or a copy to Lab. Would that make any practical difference? Thanks for any help with this.

I use a high-quality wide-gamut NEC monitor that I calibrate, so that's not the issue. Neither are settings in Lightroom, as the calibration settings are the default, and they work fine with my three camera bodies. It's a good suggestion to photograph a white card. I haven't done that. I did take essentially identical photos with the drone and my 5D Mark IV, and the greens differed. I don't have a color chart, unfortunately. I'll explore further.

I am half competent flying now, but I am still working on what will look good in a print. I found the color rendition not very good with this camera (shooting raw). Maybe I'm spoiled by the superb color science in my Canon bodies, but the images from the 2S often seem distorted to me. the most common problem is that greens look wrong, and I finally found that changing the green calibration setting in Lightroom, moving it to about 40 in the direction away from yellow, makes a big improvement. I haven't looked at the JPEGs. This may be fine in those.

I do what Adobe suggests, in the posting by hapien: try super resolution at the beginning. The impact of Super Resolution varies, in my limited experience. Sometimes it creates a noticeable improvement, while other times it doesn't. This makes sense for a machine-learning algorithm (I'm speculating here): the more characteristics the image you are trying to improve shares with the training set, the better the algorithm should work. I was recently asked to print at 8 x 10 from a 147K JPEG given to someone from a race photographer. In that case, Super Resolution did help. I tried it on a larger file of my own and was disappointed. I wouldn't worry about the file size and uploading to the printer. Uploading is not what slows a printer down, at least if you have a good connection. I print TIFF files out of Photoshop that vary from 300+ Mpix to over 900 Mpix with no problem.

My only experience is with the DJI 2S, which I have been flying for a few months. I think it's a reasonable compromise, at least for starting out. I relied more than once on the features Ed mentioned. It's very small (although not as small as the mini), and it's VERY easy to lose sight of it. I had to instruct it to fly home several times. And I wasn't really comfortable with it until I'd flown it perhaps half a dozen times. The 2S has a better camera, a 20 mp 1" sensor. It's very wide angle (22 mm equivalent). Some of the others have a slightly narrower field of view, but nonetheless, you don't have to be very high at all in many cases. Even though the 2S has a better cameria than the mini or the Air 2, I find the camera somewhat disappointing. Realistically, it's not surprising: a 2S is roughly $1,000, and much of that cost is the drone, so it's not realistic to expect the camera to come close to the 5D IV that I most often shoot. Still, I have to do more work with the drone shots to make them acceptable to me. Here's the first drone shot that I was willnig to put on my public website. It was probably my 7th or 8th time out.

I don't think they use inches in Japan (or in almost any other country in the world, for that matter). I'd bet that they are usually described in square meters, but then again, I've never been in Japan.

Although Freud apparently never actually said this, he is widely credited with having said "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." I just saw this as a still life of an egg in a trap. (I recognized it as a trap right away.) It's visually interesting anyway. Why so much space devoted to the background? Seems to me that you want people to focus on the egg and trap, and devoting almost half the vertical space to the bacground above them draws the eye away.

Nice image otherwise, but chopping off the top third of his head doesn't work for me.

I think this photo is very evocative. The modern helmets don't bother me a bit. It's a really interesting image to look at. On the technical side, you wrote: This does have a very shallow DOF, and while the image is so grainy that it's very hard to see where the point of focus is, it looks like it's somewhere around the front tires of the two bikes in front. If so, that in combination with a wide aperture will through almost everything else out of focus.Even the front two riders appear out of focus to me, but again, it's not all that easy to tell. It's all a matter of taste, but for my taste, the ideal might have been to keep the entirety of the front two riders and their bikes in focus and then let the rest fade into blur.

I don't use an Epson printer, but it seems to me that it shouldn't take long to get rid of the air. After all, a printer does this in minutes when you start it up for the first time.On the other hand, since the other lines are full, perhaps the machine doesn't know to force more of a flow in that one particular line. Have you tried the cleaning utility again since removing the tape? That might force ink through the lines. In the case of Canon printers--and I think this is true of at least some Epsons--there are two levels of cleaning, a standard utility and a deep-cleaning utility. In the case of my printer, you can run the standard utility repeatedly, but you can only do a deep cleaning about once per day because it heats the nozzles, and doing it too often can warp them. Just check your documentation, or check online, before you do repeated cleanings.

Yes, sorry, what I wrote is not correct. The issue is the extension when zooming, not focusing. I also prefer internal zooms. My EF 70-200 f/4 has a very nice, easy rotation. I also have two lenses that extend when zoomed. With the relatively light EF-24-105 II, I don't really notice it in practice. I do notice it sometimes with the EF 100-400, which weighs 1640g. For me personally, the only relevant number in making a choice was the body weight. My EF lenses are in superb condition, and two of them are very new. I would end up using them with an adapter (more weight), not selling them at a loss and replacing them with RF lenses, which also cost more to begin with. In the end, while I'd be delighted if some good-hearted soul gave me one, switching to an R5 didn't offer me enough personally, compared with a 5D IV, to make it work the $$. The one feature I really do miss is the better AF, specifically eye-AF. I do a lot of candids of kids, and that would be very helpful. I think that would make a real difference in my keeper rate.

given that Mickey is looking at Canon, and that's what I shoot, I looked up some numbers. The difference is slightly bigger than I remembered because I was comparing one body without a battery to another one with a battery. Here are the numbers: 24-105: EF 795g, RF 700g 70-200 f/2.8: EF 1480g, RF 1070g 70-200 f/4: EF 780g, RF 695g However, the latter is a little misleading. All of the EF lenses are internally focusing. The RF 70-200 f/2.8 is externally focusing (that is, it extends and retracts). That's a total redesign, so the EF/RF comparison is in some ways misleading. Bodies (including battery and card): R5: 738g 5D Mark IV: 890g The BG-R10 grip with two batteries should add about 500g, assuming the specs for the grip (351g) doesn't include batteries. But if the greater power drain of the mirrorless entails brining one more battery along without the grip, that would be roughtly 425g. So for me, not for Mickey: I often walk around with the body and a 24-105. My second most common lens is the 70-200 f/4. So, the difference in weight between 5D and R5 is noticable but not all that large--smaller by about 75g if the R5 requires one more battery.

I completely agree. It's true even within a brand, as you said. Many years ago, when I upgraded from my first Rebel to a 50D, the biggest difference for me was the ergnomics. Another big issue for me is the menu system. Canon's have always been good (IMHO), and they have gotten progressively better through the numerous Canon bodies I've had. The system in my current main camera, a 5 D IV, is very intuitive and easy to use. And, of course, the camera is highly customizable. At my age, however, there's a tradeoff between big hands and weight. My gear seems to get heavier every year. I did some arithmetic to find out how much weight I'd cut by splurging and going with an R5. The answer is not much, particularly if I keep my EF glass, which I would--most of mine is superb and in mint condition. The way to save serious weight when switching to mirrorless is to switch at the same time to a smaller sensor, which I'm not ready to do. This is one reason I never use a battery grip. For my use, it's just dead weight. I don't find the portrait orientation awkward without a grip, and while I almost always carry a second battery, the fact is that I very rarely need it, if I remember to charge before I start a shoot. However, I do keep an L-bracket on the camera most of the time, and that adds about 4 oz (100g).

As Wikipedia reports, this motto wasn't adopted until about 50 years ago. Seems pretty clear that it violates the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

BS. Not similar at all. The fear of possibly having to move into a less than million dollar house is not comparable to the fear of losing income if you're earning $15 or $20/hour--or less, in right-wing states--and don't know how you'll feed your kids. Or not being able to find a decent place to live that one can afford to begin with.

I agree with Dog: too general a question about papers. it depends on the effect you want, how much you want to pay, and again, whether you want archival properties. For everyday, non-archival printing, I mostly use luster papers. That's just my taste. If you want a luster paper, there are lots of good ones, varying in how textured they are ("satin" usually means less textured than "luster", but not always) and how cold a white the paper is. My go-to is Moab Exhibition Luster, but Red River sells one that is extremely similar. I have some Canon luster paper, but I haven't used it enough to have a strong opinion. For archival printing on coated papers, I use baryta or baryta-style papers. That's what I mostly use when I exhibit or sell (more accurately, try to sell) prints. Re media settings: every major paper vendor I have used has media settings and ICC profiles for the Canon printers I've used. I assume they do for Epson printers as well.

Price of Canon 5D Mark III when introduced in March 2012: US $3499 in 2012 dollars, $US 4164 in current (July 2021) dollars (CPI Inflation Calculator) Current price of Canon R5, which is a far more capable camera: US $3899