robert100

Ya, lemme think..... In Digital work, I've got a tad over a hundred thou exposures on the 7, well over 150 thou on the 40D, a few thou on each of a t3i, xsi, a Nikon d3200, a fuji compact zoom, a 5meg fuji, and a 2meg Nikon way back in history ...........and I'm finally gonna actually learn how to use one. 'Bout friggin time. The real thing is, that for landscape photographers this isn't as critical. (mind you, if i was photographing landscapes i wouldn't pack one of these monstrous heavy dslr's around anyway, 'd switch to the weightlessness of a one inch mirrorless in an instant), because they have two things to work with which i don't have........they have short focal lengths, and the luxury of time to work with....IE, a 1/15 or 1/8 shutter speed is an eternity of time. I work with high speed, erratically moving subjects 99 percent of the time. And the majority of the time, also with medium-to-longer focal lengths. Being able to get iso 3200, 4000, 5000, and 6400 usable changes everything - absolutely everything - in the approaches I can take. This isn't an actual "real mathematics" statement so don't read it as such, I'm only using "yak yak numbers" to make a point. The friggin depth of field on a 450 mm lens (which a "300" actually is when mounted on a 7D) at a distance to subject of 10 meters and at F5.6.....is probably about half an inch. Which means, with the squirrel for example, at F5.6, you've got the eyeball to work with and nothing else. You're trying to keep an eyeball the size of your fingernail in focus....while the squirrel's shaking and bobbing its head by more than your available total dof. And you're also gonna try and do that while you're trying to steadily hold a 450mm lens during a 1/15 second exposure ? By getting to expand that dof by moving to F11, and get to 1/300 or faster gives you a huge comparative increase in workable dof ...............and lets you catch the squirrel without motion blur. Those are not as critical if you're photographing a barn sitting still at sunset. You have more ways to play. The 7D, despite the number of them sold to people who use them for "everyday" imagery, is at its essence, designed as an "action" camera. Eight frames per second and a 22 image raw buffer weren't built in there because they help you capture barns at sunset. Those features are there so you can go "aim here, bang bang bang burst....swing over here, bang bang bang four image burst....swing two degrees to the right at the other bif go bang-etc 11 frame burst..."...and so it can do it, and it can write the buffer empty fast enough so you don't have to stop and drink a coffee waiting for it. And finally learning how to use it at 3200 and up......means I actually finally get use of it "as" the action camera it's designed to be. Like you said............"welcome to the digital club".

To the attention of Gil Pruitt and David Stephens. Taken a couple of hours ago on this mornings walk in the frigid cold wind. This little red squirrel is going to be a perfect test subject for testing with because he/she/it hangs out in the forest around the studio-trailer because the huge maples are a massive food supply, and likes popping out to see what i'm up to with the camera. Don't bother paying attention to the composition etc, and don't pick at it at the pixel level, I was firing exposures purely to test how much workable room i'd get to work with, and if I do the thing and go plus 1 ev, can i get something usable at iso6400. I really haven't done any of the "detailed" things I would do to make an image "publishable". all this is showing is two minutes of a first-stage-look at the image in dpp. I am amazed. Plain and simple. Amazed. I've never been happy with this rig even at iso1250. But I have been working with a 30 year old ingrained habit of, if anything, exposing a little on the "under" side. Check out the exif. Plus one, at 6400. Internal camera high-iso-noise-reduction settings in custom function set at "zero". Disabled. In DPP post, on the rgb slider which you can't see here, I applied the max 20 chrominance reduction, but zero luminance noise reduction. Leaving the white-balance setting at auto as exposed, instead of playing with color-temp, I instead just adjusted to warm up the shadows with the tone slider a touch. Check out the "sharpening" slider on the tool palette, which you can see on the screenshot. Amazing. This image would not even need any of it applied. The advice they're givin' us works, Tony. This just let me go to f11 and a workable shutter speed instead of trying to dig something out of a hole with f5.6 and trying to hand hold a long slow exposure . Cool.<div></div>

no one else will care about this, but i do, and need to put it on record. Earlier, i made a "correction" to my initial statement about the distance it was to the squirrel in my photo. My "correction" statement was incorrect, the distance in my first statement was the correct one, he/she is about 10 meters away. The confusion in my posts this morning arose simply because I had photographed it in three different trees Friday morning strictly as experimentation with a tip from David Stephens, and when i loaded the image this morning I wasn't sure which folder i was even working an image from. Thanks.

David...... ah.......and I just realized what you were saying wasn't about the light/shadow areas on the fur, that what you had said was that once the background was blown off the map and whited-out, whiting it out "even more" wouldn't matter, and by going to a full ev up I get more separation from the floor noise affecting the fur. Gotcha. Thanks. It's been raining almost steadily here for over a month but this week looks like we're going to be clear (and friggin cold), and although I have some yard/studio maintenance to do and some business to handle on the "artist" side of my living, I don't have any business-photography for clients on the agenda for a month, so I'll have time get to really play with your advice and work your tips into becoming "second nature" habits (pun intended).

Thanks. The areas which appear washed-out are actually in different lighting. The light is coming from the right at a low angle and there are numerous small branches casting a lattice-work of small shadows across the squirrel. That part of the thigh which appears washed out for example, is in hot sun, not in the shadow of a branch. (I just processed this into a peg quickly this morning to load here, I actually could go into elements and even those light/shadow areas out....but I won't bother) I also have a correction to make on the data. I said the distance was about 10 meters. I was thinking of a different photo. This one was actually at a distance of more like 38 to 40 meters. I was on a ladder, looking over my side fence, on the other side of the fence is a 15 foot deep gully and the squirrel is on a branch about 16 or 18 feet above ground on the other side of the gully, somewhere around 38 to 40 meters away. Crop from a Tamron 70-300 at 300.

......this one's for David Stephens. Friday Nov7, distance of about 10 meters, spot metered dead centered on the fur at +1/3ev....and....at.....iso3200. Thanks. Between you and Rick Du Boisson, the two of you have confirmed that my existing 7D won't need replacing just yet, what it will get, is a 150-600 hanging off the end.<div></div>

David. Re "we're not shooting Kodachrome anymore". One of my three favorite photography stories of all time, happened because Kodachrome existed. Galen Rowell, a photographer who did a wonderful body of work over his career, got his "start" in the world of professional photography by a fluke series of events leading to him getting an arrangement with National Geographic to photograph, "in the first person", an ascent on Half Dome. And the first photographs he had published in National Geographic, back in the days when all the newspaper correspondents were walking around with a pair of F3's hanging off their shoulders, were taken on Kodachrome, on the only camera he found practical to carry in his pocket on the climb............ A Kodak Instamatic. (the original "point and shoot") It was his first of several assignments on behalf of National Geographic. Gear's nice. But the gear don't take the photograph. The photographer takes the photograph.

Tony, based on your comments, you've been doing exactly as I always had, which was 'boost the iso' - but - still work at an EV essentially "centering" the exposure. And, i was never happy with the noise. The tip given here, was that the way to reduce the noise problem was to expose to get a +ev reading with the 7D's in- camera ttl meter, and that is what reduces the noise factor and lets you work with thr higher iso's. In terms of "long exposures" ie via slow shutter speeds, although I own a good one, I personally may use a tripod once in five thousand exposures, and I try to work at 1/1000 of a second or faster. 99 point 99 percent of what I photograph, is high activity, extremely fast-action. And if you grab a look at David Stephens work, i think you'll notice that to him, 1/2000 is a "slow" shutter......and he gets usable images out of a 7D at iso6400. And what I talk about which I've done in the past couple of days, is to understand what he does which I had not been doing consistently, which is expose "brighter". IE, I took a situation which in past I may have exposed to be "bang on" by using iso6400 and a shutter speed of, say, 1/1000, instead, leaving the aperture alone, I cut the shutter to maybe 1/500. Which gave me a +EV exposure...........et voila, when i downloaded it and brought the ev back "down" in post, it came "back down" and gave me an image from an iso set at 6400, with a whole lot less noise than by working at "normal" ev. The slowest shutter speed of any of the images I toyed with in my experiment was and which gave me very usable images, was 1/320 at one image, and four or five of them are images I exposed at iso6400, aperture at f8 (on a 300 mm lens), and a shutter speed of 1/4000 of a second. And that's key, because being able to work at 1/2000 and faster is a huge advantage to me in the kind of work i do. If you click on my name i do have samples in the photonet portfolio space (not from this test) but showing the type of work I'm primarily involved in for industrial/commercial clients. Fast moving subjects, in tough, dirty environments which can tear the living crap out of good camera gear. The fine chaff dust which comes off farm equipment gets in everything, it gets in your eyes, ears, nose....and in your lenses, and in every nook and cranny in a camera. Same thing with the concrete dust off heavy industrial equipment. In an afternoon in the field with equipment spewing blasting dust in the air, it's easy to write off a cameras or a lens in an afternoon. Being able to work with higher iso's so I can use very fast shutter speeds, is a huge boon. I don't have any "fire" samples up right now, but i also do a significant amount of work with fire departments, a fire-investigation department, and firefighter/rescue personnel training in which my most "important" piece of gear isn't my camera, it's my Nomex fire-resistant suit. Same thing in all those situations. Fast moving subjects, dangerous environments. And the increased iso is a huge advantage. And then the advantages of high iso simply carries over to the "birds and the bugs" stuff which I do "primarily" just for myself. Fast moving subjects in rapidly changing lighting situations. This, the tips these guys have passed on to us here and which I'm finding will be useful to me, will help you get away from the need to be "stuck" at slow shutter speeds and low iso's in those situations where they're impractical.

To Arnold Shapiro. Incidentally, despite the joking about the fact it would be obviously impossible for me to differentiate between a jpeg you create by setting your camera's internal button to "convert and save as jpeg" versus downloading the raw data to your laptop then hitting the "convert and save as jpeg" button on your keyboard, I do want to express my sincere appreciation for the time and effort you are spending sharing your hands-on experience with the mkii. That is a camera which is on my own "potentially very interesting" list, and i am paying close attention to every word you share about it, i assure you.

to Arnold Shapiro. You definitely have my attention, because you've told me you can do something that for the few short years I have been using photo.net I have never been able to find a way to do. You've told me that you have knowledge of a way to upload a raw image file in photonet so I can look at it here on my own monitor ? Please. Please. Explain to me how you do that. Because nothing would excite me more than to discover I can upload raw image files to photonet. I have spent hours and hours, having to convert any image i upload here to be converted to and uploaded in a jpeg file. And most of the forums require even that jpeg to be downsized to 700 pixels on the longest side. I will pee myself with joy when I learn how I am able to upload a raw file here.

ya, i actually hammered off a couple of iso6400 exposures of one of those cardboard grease-tubes for a grease gun which was sitting on a wall about 35 feet away, and boosted the exposure to a full plus 1, and then a full plus 2. I've used it as a 'test sample' other times, specifically because if has a lot of type-setting on it in various colors and font sizes and wraps around the tube, so i could play with dof tests and sharpness of lenses.....and the ones at a full plus 2 amazed me with what they give me to play with..... I also fired a couple of exposures of strongly back-lit large maple leaves, with the sun beaming right through em, virtually blowing them right off the hilite end. I was astounded to discover i could even pull any color and detail back into them from a full plus 2.......and i found that on those, there's more detail available to pull back down, with less noise, than there would be if you were coming up from 2 "below". It's simple, it's the same as working with negative back in the film days, the opposite of working with chromes, "Under-exposing" was a major mistake with negative film, because it meant that there had not been enough light, enough photon-energy, allowed to hit the particles to register any information on them. Thus, there was no information there for you to "pull up", it simply never got there. Whereas if you made an "over" error, some films had a lot more latitude available at the "washed out" looking end of the neg than you'd think. The photon energy had "been there", it had written the data on the film, and you at least had a shot at recovering it. And I've realized (i'd never given it any thought before) now, that when i'm looking at red and blue dots of noise in a shadow, what i' actually looking at, is an image of pixel from the sensor which never had enough light hit it to register an electrical impulse on it greater than the sensor's inherent noise-level. I hadn't clue'd into that until i read one of the articles Mac linked to, and when i read it, my brain had it's little "aha" moment and i realized why you gain data by going "to the right" (versus what would be the camera's TTL meter's opinion.............which is different than taking an incident reading with a flash meter iii) There's a lot of other little specifics which will affect 'when/where/how much", but the key is understanding the concept of having to get-above-the-floor-noise level. IE,other specifics, such as "just because one camera model says "this is 100iso", and another camera make/model says "this is 100iso". doesn't mean they are giving you the "same" "100iso".". An iso "number" given by a camera make/model is a "word term", not a engineering-specific. This is no different than it was back in film days either incidentally, just because the mfr rated a film at ASA100 didn't mean it truly was, and in fact, we always bought 120 film in 500 roll quantities making sure they all came with the same mfr run number (ie dye lot) on them, then we had a specific lighting set up we test fired 2 rolls under, found out what they "actually" were (anywhere from maybe ASA80 up), and then stored the entire supply in a fridge so it didn't heat-deteriorate in the 2 or 3 months to use it all. It would be interesting (but i'll never take the time) to test each camera you own, at each of it's iso settings, and find out what they read actually are at each. ie it's possible that what one model says is iso100, is more like 85 or 90 or 106.....and what it says is iso3600 is maybe only working at 3490, or maybe it's actually 3812. Those variations are all very technically possible. And "within a manufacturing tolerance". (IE, have you ever read Bob Atkins test of the Sigma 150-500 lens, in which he found that it's actually only a 150 to about 450.....and that is "within quotable tolerance".........well, see, other "specs" on gear are also subject to "variable tolerances") David, I've spent months looking at the images you've posted of birds from your 7D where you showed settings like iso3200, all showing marvelous detail and pretty noise free, and have been frustrated as h with my own 7D because I haven't been able to use it above 1250 without getting red-blue-dots-junk.....and now I find out that the key to it, is your images also have always showed "plus" xamount-ev. It had never registered in my tiny brain before, that there was a difference within my own images in noise, in whether they were exposed at a minus-ev, or plus-ev reference. Now that has been mentioned, I flipped back through some files and can spot the difference within my own image files easily. This whole little exercise has totally given my 7d a new lease on life, because seriously, the only reason i've worked with it at all through the dis-satisfaction with its noise performance, is that it\s the only 'affordable' camera out here with a buffer which can keep itself emptied at the rate i need it to. I've stated it many times, the "fps" isn't the key, I love the 8fps and use it, but I could live with 6.5 as long as it has a huge buffer which can write itself off to keep up, and nothing else out here does that. (believe me, if a d7000 had a decent buffer I would have switched to Nikon a year ago, I stood with one in my hand in the store for fifteen minutes, right on the edge of buying it and ditching canon, but i could not live with the ridiculously small buffer capacity it has.) This changes everything. Just gaining this knowledge, realizing the noise has been hit-or-miss just because of my own inattention to this one detail of using it, now totally expands the viability of this camera, and will increase my enjoyment of using it. (and gee, seeing as how I have well over a hundred thousand images off it, it's kinda nice to suddenly wake up one day and find out it's more useable than i knew)

Tony, if you're still picking up notification on this thread, thanks to the tip from Gil Pruitt (seconded by David S on here) and some links I read thanks to tips from Mac Hordam on a different thread, I've used a few moments free time over the last couple of days to play with my 7D, (which as i stated, i've never been happy with above iso1250 as a practical limit) and their tip of "under exposure is the main culprit in producing digital noise in images" definitely holds water. Taking a quick look back through a significant batch of images, it really was evident that the noise I was experiencing which led me to start confining exposures with the 7D to under iso1250, was pretty much in images I had exposed on "the darker side" of things. (i really like wildlife/bird/nature images with good strong darks in them, and working a tad on the minus-ev-side is a thing which ingrained itself in my brain as second-nature way back in the days of working with 4x5 chrome) So, on finding that, I dragged that camera along on my walk in the woods yesterday with the iso set to 6400, aperture priority to f8, compensation to plus 1/3 ev, and worked specifically at exposing some images "to the lighter" side. I didn't come across any wildlife or birds in the right situations to give me anything which will ever be a publishable image, but I did get a half dozen of a squirrel in lighting conditions I would have previously just not bothered "wasting a frame on" at iso1250 and spot-metered to be "centered" on a ttl-exposure reading because my experience has been that any crop out of it would have too much chrominance noise in the fur to be used. (animal fur and bird feathers are the supreme noise-challenge subject, because they're always light-dark intermingled patches and soft-intermingled-edges) And Voila......playing around with a couple of those exposed experimentally at iso6400 and even only 1/3 plus ev, then bringing the shadow depth back in during post, gave me cleaner images than what I would have had if I'd exposed at iso1250 and the needle "centered" on the TTL spot-meter reading. Images which substantiated beyond doubt to me, that the 7D will in fact give me usable images up to iso6400 just by adhering to that advice Gil gave in his, the first response posted, to your question: (paraphrased)......open things up and let the sensor acquire enough photon data to climb above its inherent noise level. I'm gald you asked the question initially, and glad Gil and David were here to post an answer. My thanks to all of you. (the key to photography is the same as the key to everything else in life. No matter how old ya are, no matter how long you've been doin' somethin', and no matter what level ya been doin' it at.......get out of bed every single morning with an open mind, and the firm belief you'll learn something new that day.......and, you will.)

trying to judge how any camera's sensor (this one or any other) is at handling noise, is a pointless question if you're working in jpegs. Jpegs are a processed image, that processing algorithm includes noise correction/reduction. There is not enough of the original data left in a jpeg image for you to make any judgement on. Expose in raw, with all your settings at "neutral", then have a look at a "dark" area in the image at magnification, and you'll be looking at what the camera can do, not what the jpeg algorithm does. Without doing that, there's nothing to base a judgement on.

Bill Jordan, thanks for the tip on the "S"PPC" thingy in digital darkroom, I didn't know that existed. I just popped over there and got a look at this week's opthalmologist class, now I get to have hours of fun browsing through what was done in prior weeks.

Dave Hoffman, you're not a whiner, we were all told what we were buying when they took our money, and one of the things we were sold as a "major benefit", was an Imagepro website. I'm like you and many others, I invested a ton of hours into initially working out a layout and process for working my images into a suitable format for upload to my site, and countless hours maintaining it in the years i had it. I also, like you and the others, advertised that site, spent money on business cards, etc. What they've done makes their current advertising to people they are now asking to join as to "the benefits of giving them your money" totally meaningless, because they have now established the precedent that they are fully willing to go back on that at any time after you pay them. This is real simple, there is a lot of talk on a number of forums here about "what it takes to be a professional photographer", and one of the major things it takes, is to ensure your clients are delivered what you say you will deliver to them. Photo net has not done so. That appears to be, as defined by those comments in the forums, very un -professional. You're not a whiner, you're someone who was sold something,and therefore expected to receive it.

................learning more about.......:and maybe eventually becoming a professional......... People are giving you all kinds of advice about how or how not to go about it, but you haven't even said what you mean by "becoming a professional". Do you mean you want to open a physical studio with a camera room and your own in-house lab and you intend to do 50 high dollar portraits and a maybe ten or twelve 7 or 8 thousand dollar weddings a year ? Or do you want to be a professional commercial/heavy-industrial photographer working only outside on location and delivering finished work to clients only on digital media? Or do you want to be a professional wildlife photographer freelancing to publications and/or a "national geo" type photographer professionally photographing tribes in the Amazon jungle ? Each of those fields, all of which involve professionals doing professional photography, involve drastically different skill-sets, equipment, and different approaches to every aspect of their operations. I at one time was a partner in a very large studio operation doing the "high ticket" portraits and weddings I described, and in the 20 some odd years since I sold my partnership in that studio, I have done freelance wildlife work, and still do a goodly amount of heavy commercial/industrial location work. And the only similarity that any of those three professional photography businesses I have been involved in have, is that they all involve me using a camera. Settle a little more specifically on what field of professional photography interests you, and then go knock on the door of someone working professionally in that field and offer to buy em a coffee or lunch and pick their brain. The really good ones love to "mentor".

incidentally, i should add, in that i made the statement your practice head doesn't need to be perfect, that there are a couple of things about it which will be important: make a couple of noses you can interchange, one "prominent", one not so. And pay attention to the bone structure around the eyes, don't just draw eyes on it, make sure you set the eyes back in, as they are on real head, so the eye-brow area casts a definite shadow into the eye area when lit from above ie as sun would be at noon. That's how you'll practice and learn how to control light to open up the eyes. And I;ll toss in a little "tidbit tip" for you to play with....make one eye smaller than the other. The majority of people have one eye smaller than the other......and professional portrait photographers know what to do with that when posing people. I'm not going to tell you what that is, that's something you'll learn, or figure out.

as portraits are your objective, find or make yourself a practice dummy head, the kind of styrofoam heads they use in stores. If you can't find an actual pre-made head, use a styrofoam ball and glue some rough shape eyes lips nose and ears on it. The thing doesn't have to be perfect, nobody's real head is and they're also all different anyway. What it will give you, instead of wearing out your friends (especially while you are producing the poor images initially, they don't want to see poor photos of themselves) is Practice - the amount of practice - it takes to become proficient in setting up lighting quickly and efficiently, is large. Many, many hours. The styro dummy head will be totally patient while you practice, while you test setting a light a foot away, then three feet away, at a 30 degree angle, then a 35 degree angle, and while you practice and test setting the subject-head four feet in front of a background and then 6 feet in front of it. You study, by studying, by observing while others do it - and right now, as someone has mentioned, there;s lots of "bad" examples of things on you tube....but there are also some really really good ones. And watching someone do it on you tube, beats the pants off looking at diagrams in a book. However, that is, as I say, how you "study". You Learn, only by doing. You learn, only when it is your own mind and hands and eyes doing the doing. Your eyes and hands and mind will learn what doesn't work, by doing what doesn't work. And they will learn what does work, only by physically doing what does. You learn how to set up butterfly lighting, only by physically actively, personally setting up butterfly lighting. You learn how to effectively use a "hat" as a prop to push light in and open up the eyes, only by putting one on a head and playing with it. And then you do it over, and over, and over, and over, until you can do it blindfolded. And the styro dummy won't get bored when you start practicing at 0800 and you're still practicing at 2300. It'll be the best portrait learning-tool you'll ever own.

it's not picking up the image with the posting<div></div>

one by itself

thanks David, actually i have that on the tool palette i have, but the Tamron SP 70-300 which is pretty much the permanent fixture on the 7D isn't covered. Tony, while I've primarily been watching a football game this afternoon i've also been toying on the side with an image from a couple of weeks ago off the 7d and that lens, and i've actually been surprised, using a small addition of that contrast tool in the rgb section i've been able to produce a pretty acceptable shadow area in it, eliminating most of the chrominance noise in the darks, and it's an image i exposed at 2000 iso specifically to test settings. So this may be the comparable tool to lightrooms 'contrast / clarity' tool David mentioned However, you also mentioned you were having particular problem with the noise from your canon lens which was the kit with the 7d, so the tool David spoke of within dpp which is the "lens" tool on the palette may be of direct help for you. I know I'm glad you started this thread because it has led me to do some more playing and I'll be benefiting from it.

David, I just pulled the discs out of the storage box to check. I have three eos digital solutions discs, the discs are id'd as ver 14.2, ver 15.1, and ver 24.1, each of which would have come with one of the three eos rigs i own, a 40d, the 7d, and a t3i. The T3i disc would be the most recent of the three. If i recall, when i bought the t3i i didn't bother to load its disc and then in fact discovered that the version of dpp i was using didn't recognize the camera, so i did load it. I also recall I later went to the Canon USA site and downloaded the upgrades to that. I think what I have is very up to date. I'll check the canon site. Thanks for the tip. Disappointingly, my old elements 6 can't even be upgraded to work with cr2 files whic h is why i have to convert to tif....and it only handles 8 bit tifs at that, not 16 bit. C'est la vie, I couldn't go with the new "cloud" crap of pshop, i spend 90 percent of my time off line and in locales where i can't even go on line, so i have to have pure stand alone stuff. That is one thing which drives me nuts about the entire industry, is they think everyone is walking around tethered magically to their belly button cloud. I'm not. I can go weeks where I don't even have access to a wifi, I have to have stand alone technology. The thing I really appreciate about dpp incidentally, is that you're not actually changing the initial image with any of the work you do. The original image always remains on file in fact exactly as photographed, all dpp does is create a file with a "recipe" in it which it applies when you pull up the image file. Thus you can play and change till the cows come home and all you have to do is punch "revert to "as shot"" and your experimental changes are dust in the wind. This is not the case in elements or pshop, in them, you make a change and "save" it, and once you've gone one step past that you no longer have the "undo" available in edit........your prior image is poof, gone. The amazing thing for people who work on jpegs, is that by applying only a separately maintained 'recipe' file, dpp allows them to work on pegs without the dreaded degradation piled on degradation. The truly foolish thing is I actually ignored dpp for years because i hadn't invested the time to learn it was a decent tool. For years, I was taking the canon cr2 files, which elements can't use, and going through a horrendously time consuming process of converting them to "dng" files which it can work with, then working on them in elements, further converting them to tifs where i could layer my "black background/name" to them, and then downsizing and converting to jpegs to upload to photo.net for my ImagerPro site to access. Massive amounts of work per-image. Learning what dpp can do has reduced my workload substantially.

JDM. The link you provided to the old Bob Atkins article is nice, but, it is "part 1", which challenges you, then promises to inform you of more in "part 2"......................and now not only am i going nuts because i pixel peep, i'm also going squirrely and itchy because i haven't been able to track down the promised "part 2"......

you've just given me something to go test, David. I have to go play in dpp to find out what the difference is between the contrast tool in the rgb section of the palette vs the contrast tool in the raw section. Also, for information, for any work an image requires beyond the basics dpp can perform, i have to then convert it to a tif and take it into an old version of elements 6 i use to do things like clean up distractions by removing tree branches which my lead the viewer's eye out of frame etc. The older version I have, elements 6, is a superb piece of software, back then it was still a "user's" set of tools almost as complete as the full p'shop of the time. Thus, within it, there are numerous ways i can then take any small section of an image i find 'over-sharpened' by dpp and soften it back just within that small area, or vice-versa, ie i can sharpen only a bird's eye while leaving the rest of the image more soft and natural appearing. Over-sharpened images start to make animals and birds look like inanimate cardboard cutouts isolated from the landscape. Anyway, I'll have to go play with the contrast slider in dpp's rgb section to see if that may be an equivalent "micro contrast" or "clarity" tool. Thanks.

if you're serious about weddings and portraits, stay away from the 7D. I own one, I use it every day, i have well over a hundred thousand exposures on it. But I do so in the outdoors, hiking, where I need the one and only valuable feature it has, which is a buffer which can handle 8 fps bursts of 18 meg images all day long when I;m photographing birds and animals which flush and move off quickly. The 7D is an "outdoor/field" camera", that's the only reason it even exists. I also have a t3i, which is a cheapo entry-level rig a quarter of the cost of the 7D, and if I were going to do a portrait sitting I'd use the f3i instead of the 7D. You don't need 8fps and a massive buffer to do portraits, you go one click at a time, and going one click at a time even the cheapo little t3i will outperform because its sensor is superior in terms iso noise handling vs the old one in the 7D.