franklin_white

<p>Disclaimer: I haven't used Paintshop Pro in years, but I was familiar with versions X2 and X3, which I used side by side with earlier versions of Photoshop Elements. Based upon my admittedly stale experience, I would recommend going with Elements. Although PSP has always had <em>more</em> features than Elements, the program was slow (at least X2 and X3 were slow; things may have improved in the intervening years), the tools didn't work as well as the tools in Elements, and the program, as a whole, was not as easy to use as Elements. I currently use Elements 13 with Lightroom 4 and that combination does everything I need and more. </p>

<p>You might want to try something like the Westcott spiderlites that can accept either fluorescent or tungsten light bulbs. Unfortunately, the ones that pump out a good amount of light (i.e., at least 1,000 watt equiv.) are not inexpensive. The tungsten bulbs may be too hot for the softboxes you are using, but the fluorescent should be ok, depending on the dimensions of the softbox. You may need an adapter to attach your softbox to the spiderlite.</p>

<p>If the camera is providing what you want all (or even most) of the time, I would select the RAW+Jpeg option if it will not cause problems with card space or shooting speed.</p>

<p>I received a similar e-mail from Adobe yesterday, but the offer was to buy CS6 for $299 -- not $199. I don't think I'm going to bite for $299, but had I received the $199 offer I would probably snap it up.</p>

<p>A wide angle lens is needed, but how wide will depend upon the size of the statue, the size of the house, and the distance of the house from the statue. Try a 28mm lens.</p>

<p>If you're shooting a red rose, the red channel is often going to overload long before the other channels. If you don't watch this on an RGB historgram, you will never get the color of the flower to look right. You can also often mess up fine distinctions in skin color by letting the red channel clip. </p>

<p>If the focal length is the problem, why don't you try the Canon 10-22mm lens. I'm not sure why you want a new camera body when your problem is with the lenses you're using. </p>

<p>I have the original Tamron 17-50mm and the Canon 18-135mm that came with my 60D. <br>

The Tamron is very sharp and has f/2.8. It's my main lens for most purposes. You really can't go wrong with this one. I've never used the IS version of this lens. <br>

The 18-135mm is not as sharp as the Tamron, but, if you shoot RAW, you can correct almost everything that's wrong with this lens by using the new Digital Lens Optimizer (and older lens corrections) features incorporated in Canon's Digital Photo Professional. DPP really helps to squeeze the last bit of IQ out of this lens, and the lens is otherwise a great travel lens because you can take just the 18-135 and leave all the rest behind. All the important focal lengths are covered. Yes, the 18-135mm is slow at the telephoto focal lengths, but the IS feature works better on this lens than a lot of the other inexpensive Canon lenses.</p>

<p>I really like the 15-85mm and would like to buy it someday, but when I was looking for a good landscape lens I went with the 10-22mm instead. You should be aware that the 15-85mm has a lot of distortion at 15mm, and, when you correct the distortion in post, you will lose a bit of the angle of view. The 10-22mm is much better in this regard; there is almost no distortion at all at 15mm, which is right in the sweet spot of the lens. My recommendation would be to sell everything but the Tamron 17-50mm (awesome lens) and get the 10-22mm. Those two lenses will likely do everything you need, as you say that you don't shoot macro with the 60mm.</p>

<p>The 60mm macro is a great lens. It is more versatile for crop shooters than the 100mm, but, for <em>macro purposes</em> only, the lens with the longest minimum focusing distance is almost always best bet. I shoot a lot of coins with the 60mm, but I'm considering moving up to the 100mm macro just so that I can have more "air" above the coin for better lighting. The great thing is that with these modern high megapixel cameras, cropping can come to the rescue (at least with lenses as sharp as the 60mm macro). In many cases, it's just not all that important to shoot at the minimum focusing distance; you just crop and still get a decent sized picture. </p>

<p>There is a chapter in the book Light Science and Magic where a guy is trying to remove the reflection of himself and the camera from a shot of a bowl of ornaments. You probably need to do what he did.</p>

<p>If you're looking for a reflected light meter, there is a very inexpensive iPhone app that works well and is under $20. If you're looking for an incident light meter for under $20 (new or used), I would be surprised if you could find anything that would work accurately.</p>

<p>As mentioned, there aren't a lot of options for wide angle for a 1.6x format Canon DSLR. You get your "basic" wide-angle (by that I mean the 28mm and 35mm equivalents) by using one of the 18-XX lenses from Canon or a third party manufacturer. If you need wider, you get one of the 10/11/12-XX lenses from Canon or a third party manufacturer. Some folks may prefer to get the 15-85mm to serve the purpose of both standard zoom and wide angle, but they will have to live with 15mm (24mm equivalent) as the widest setting. <br>

I don't think that you should even be considering a prime lens for this purpose on a 1.6x format camera.</p>

<p>Your friend was probably referring to the so-called full frame DSLRs have an image sensor that is about the same size as a frame of 35mm film. Those cameras are relatively expensive and quite heavy. Also, the lenses you have really aren't good enough to get the most out of, say, a 5DMkII. Yes, the larger sensor helps with reducing high ISO noise, but the noise issue is not all that bad with the other DSLR cameras when the camera is used at more normal sensitivities (ISO 100-800) -- especially at print sizes of 8x10 and smaller. I therefore recommend that you consider buying a so-called "crop" DSLR. You could probably buy a used EOS Rebel Xsi/ 450D for $250 and, at 12 mp, that camera has more than the resolution that you specified. <br>

You could use the 450D with your lenses, but be aware that the 450D body, typical of Canon crop cameras, has a 1.6x lens conversion factor, which would result in your 35-80mm lens providing an angle of view similar to that of a 55-130mm lens used on a 35mm film camera. This conversion eliminates the intended purpose of the 35-80mm zoom as one that would cover both wide angle and short telephoto focal lengths. For that reason, you should probably replace that with the EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS. <br>

You should be fine with the EF 100-300mm. I used to have that lens years ago. It's more than good enough to give you great results with a modern DSLR as long as you stick in the 100-250mm part of the range. At 300mm, the finer resolution of the DSLR may show a bit more CA than what you saw in film where you couldn't blow everything up to 100 percent on a computer monitor.<br>

For extension, I'm sure that you could use a Canon 12mm extension tube with the 35-80mm or the 18-55mm lenses. I'm not sure whether those either of those zoom lenses can use the longer Canon 25mm extension tube. There are cheaper, off brand, alternatives if you don't want to buy Canon, but make sure that the brand will work with the particular lens. The 12mm tube will not give you true (1:1) macro magnification, but it probably get you somewhere between 1:3 and 1:2 magnification, which is good enough for a lot of subjects.<br>

If you take my advice and get the 18-55mm IS lens, you will have wide angle. There are specialized wide angle lenses, such as the excellent EF-S 10-22mm, but you will pay a lot for that. Most folks can probably make due with 18mm. As for fish eye, I'm not aware of an inexpensive option (I've never used that type of lens, but I have seen very creative shots using that type of lens).</p>

<p>What do you mean by "WB adjustment is in the middle"? Are you using Auto WB, or one of the presets. You may want to check to see if the Tungsten preset is being used. If it is, outside photos will probably be all blue.</p>

<p>You might want to consider the Canon S95. It's a small compact sensor, but it has good quality and manual controls.</p>

<p>I'm not sure that I understand the problem. If you have the shutter speed set to 1/60, can you change it to 1/100 and then back to 1/60. Or will it stay at 1/100?</p>

<p>I'm another who has both the Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 (non-VC) and the EF 28mm f/1.8. I generally prefer to use the Tamron lens for the versatility, but I do believe that the 28mm prime is better at f/2.8 than the zoom. I would never hesitate to use the 28mm at f/2.0 or smaller apertures. I will not use it at f/1.8, however. My $.02.</p>

<p>I'm a long time PSE user who also has PSP x2 and x3. I stopped using PSP because I could not tolerate how slow PSP ran on my old MS Windows XP computer. I've never had that kind of problem with any version of PSE. I very recently bought a much faster MS Windows 7 machine with 8 GB ram. With the faster machine, I'm tempted to try PSP again. IMO, however, although PSP has far more serious editing features than PSE will ever have, the <em>quality</em> of some of the PSE tools are noticeably better than PSP. For example, even before PSE introduced the content-aware healing brush in version 9, I often noticed that the healing brush and spot healing brush in PSE8 produced edits that were more or less invisible -- even at larger than pixel view magnifications. With PSP x2 and x3 edits didn't blend as well. </p>

<p>Humans have a hard time accurately judging the brightness of a continuous light source (or at least humans and cameras disagree on this point). A 500 watt tungsten bulb is not bright at all (a light meter, or your camera settings, will confirm this) but, to the subject sitting right in front of the light, it will appear to be very bright (and very hot). If you plan to shoot portraits, I would recommend that you go all in with strobes and that you sell the continuous setup for whatever you can get for it from someone who shoots video. Your current setup will not be useful for background lighting for two reasons. First, as mentioned, these lights are simply not bright enough to balance well with typical key light settings and your backgrounds will often be too dark. Second, tungsten lighting is orange in color and this will not mix with the white or bluish white light from the strobes. </p>

<p>I own a Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 lens, but I often carry only the Canon 10-22mm and 55-250mm IS. Obviously, the so-called "normal" focal lengths are not well represented with this setup, but I find that most of my shooting is in the 15-20mm and 60-135mm range. If some manufacturer were to issue a 15-135mm lens, I would be all over that in a heartbeat.</p>

<p>Think of it the other way around. A circular polarizer filter can be used as a very weak ND filter because it will reduce the exposure by two stops. </p>

<p>If you really need to get the WB right in mixed lighting, you will need to eliminate one of the light sources so that there is no conflict (for example, bounced flash off a ceiling with a low ISO, fast shutter speed, medium aperture will usually eliminate all other artificial light sources, but that might kill the lighting effect you wanted to achieve) or use gels (usually some strength of orange) on the flash to match the color of the existing lighting. Photoshop can fix most things, but why do all that work when taping a gel on the flash head can solve the problem right there.</p>

<p>If you expose RAW files to be slightly <em>over</em>exposed (without totally blowing a particular color channel beyond recovery), you can often adjust both the brightness and contrast in the RAW editor without adding noise. This technique is preferable to increasing exposure in PP, which always adds noise. If you added noise, most RAW editors include a noise reduction function that will allow you to remove it (while slightly softening the image).</p>

<p>This is a bit surprising to me, as most of these entry SLR cameras seem to default to popping up the flash for inside shots when in auto mode. The white balance problems that you are describing appear to be related to non-flash shots where the white balance is incorrect. If that is the problem, the only solution is for you to learn how to set the white balance accurately (either in-camera, in RAW post processing, or both). You could keep exchanging the camera, but, in general, Canon doesn't have good auto white balance for indoor shots under ordinary household incandescents. </p>