Infiltration

SeikoLiz location: 21061 Gender: Male The beast with those four dirty paws \| \| \| \|	Trying new RAW development software... < on 2/28/2012 4:00 PM >

	After years spent establishing a solid, tried and true method of image processing with Photoshop, this past weekend I felt compelled to abandoned it almost entirely for new RAW development software (ACR be damned). I've long loved Olympus and their JPGs for the color and tonality they present. As such, with a recent real estate photography job I did, it seemed prudent to render the RAWs I captured with those colors. Popped open Viewer 2 and went to work playing with it and HOLY SHIT it's glorious! Not only is it permitting use of the JPG color profiles I love, but it allows for the subtle tweaks of those profiles as well as a mountain of other tweaks that I could spend hours in Photoshop/ACR trying to replicate. HOWEVER... it is completely in the realm of possibility that the images actually look like complete balls and I am more or less just fooling myself because I am so tickled by a method of processing that is new and not the mundane process I've been using for the past year or so. So how about I let you guys be the judge? I'll start from the top: Okay, so, now that I'm looking at this image on my work monitor and not my home monitor it does look a little dark. I used the i-Enhance color profile on this guy with gradation set to maybe 15% (gradation is basically a user tweakable ADR [Nikon] or i-Contrast [Canon]). I subdued the colors by dropping saturation but am now rethinking that method since the image does look a bit flat. The cool part, though, is that Viewer 2 has the lens profiles for all the Oly glass I'm using saved so it auto-corrects for distortion and perspective when I ask it to. Yay straight lines! Same process went into this image, only I used a muted color profile. Another very nice thing about the lens corrections the program implements is that it saps the ugly purple fringing out of high contrast transitions and lens flares. More than anything, however, I think I'm in love with manual gradation tweaks - I can get the broader dynamic range I want on my own terms, not the noisy terms pretty much every camera set to "auto" provides. Another muted color profile with added desaturation. Another lovely option available are the color filters. In Photoshop I would often create a modification layer with an 81A filter, drop its opacity a bit but still have to make an 82A filter layer and tweak its opacity to maintain the proper luminosity. With Viewer 2, there's a goddamn check box that asks if you want to preserve luminosity after applying the color filter... easy! Saves me a step in my post process. While part of me wants to scream and complain about the blown highlights on the left of the image, I couldn't find a "recovery" tool equivalent in the program, and after saving the TIFF file there was no data there to recover. Of course, this probably just means there never was any data there to begin with... a blown highlight is a blown highlight, plain and simple. Nice that the shadowed area on the right balanced out so well, though. This was an XZ-1 shot, product of a compact. RAWs processed in ACR still retain more sharpness compared to Viewer 2, but regardless there is still plenty of sharpness and detail in Viewer 2 processed images, plus the tonality and color is just that much better. This is a muted profile image, auto-corrected color fringes, sharpened only via RAW processing. Photoshop's smart sharpen tool still does a better job for bringing a bit more out of the finer details but it doesn't seem to cooperate all that well with RAWs processed with Viewer 2, not sure why. Lots of white halos on contrasty sections. Also, automatic distortion/perspective correct is AWESOME. This one has a direct comparison I can provide: Aside from the obvious difference of the lower/original version being much more contrasty, I think there's a definite indication that my still undeveloped abilities in Viewer 2 to process an image appealingly is winning in this case. I like the lesser contrast, and I like the gradation. Photoshop fights too hard to pull down the highlights sometimes, and it just doesn't work with the smog. I could've changed the editing in Photoshop to compensate but then the sky would've been completely blown out. I don't know how it did it, but Viewer 2 just knew what worked - gradation in this instance was left on full-auto. Also, sorry if that one's not entirely urbex related. Not that there aren't legions of folks here who wouldn't love to dote on industrial scenery, active or not. Simple exterior, one of my early attempts with Viewer 2. Another XZ-1 shot like the last 2. Not compositionally striking or anything, but another example of solid, appealing color (muted to my taste), tonal gradation and sharpness. I actually tried processing this shot in Photoshop before but couldn't get a look in ACR that I liked as a base despite hours of tweaking. With Viewer 2 I got what I wanted literally in minutes, it was amazing. Again, the gradation tool saved the look of this image for me. And yeah, this bitch is COMPLETELY not urbex related but lends an idea to how sharp Viewer 2 manages to process images. Again, ACR renders RAWs sharper in general, but Viewer 2 can be tweaked to achieve almost comparable/ideal sharpness. It's not far off at all, and this image speaks to that fact. Plus, she's my beardy girl, I love anything that makes her look awesome. So yeah, what do you guys think? You've surely seen enough of my crap posted up here over the year(s), how does Viewer 2's processing hold up? Criticisms! I demand criticisms! We didn't need a story. We didn't need a real world. We just had to keep walking. And we became the stories, we became the places. We were the lights, the deserts, the faraway worlds. We were you before you even existed.

.Kyle location: Guelph/Burlington, Ontario Gender: Male \|	Re: Trying new RAW development software... <Reply # 1 on 3/1/2012 8:53 PM >

	Damn it looks pretty nice, wish I could give it a try but I shoot canon. Nice photos by the way Tralalalalalalala

toefu location: North N.J. Gender: Male \| \|	Re: Trying new RAW development software... <Reply # 2 on 3/1/2012 10:28 PM >

	what's going on to the right of the last photo? http://www.flickr.com/photos/toefu/

Sigfather location: Groton, Connecticut, United States Gender: Male \| \|	Re: Trying new RAW development software... <Reply # 3 on 3/2/2012 1:15 PM >

	I could be wrong, but it looks to me like reflection on the glass of her terrarium. "Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt

SeikoLiz

location:
21061
Gender: Male

The beast with those four dirty paws

Re: Trying new RAW development software...
<Reply # 4 on 3/5/2012 1:31 PM >

Posted by Sigfather
I could be wrong, but it looks to me like reflection on the glass of her terrarium.

Yeah, what he said. Even when I clean her glass it still causes light to bloom off her.

Anywho, by the massive silence either these shots suck 11 different kinds of ass or are so supermassively mediocre that they don't warrant criticism. Either way, cool, at least they have attracted no troll attention like the legions of clown vomit aficionados!

We didn't need a story. We didn't need a real world. We just had to keep walking. And we became the stories, we became the places. We were the lights, the deserts, the faraway worlds. We were you before you even existed.

micro Gender: Male Slowly I turned \|	Re: Trying new RAW development software... <Reply # 5 on 3/5/2012 4:39 PM >

	I don't think the photos are all that interesting. It seems you've put too much thought into the processing and not enough into the composition, lighting and subject matter of the photo itself. Certainly these aren't images that should require "hours of tweaking." I understand that post-processing can often be half the fun in photography, but none of these images really work well to begin with. No amount of fancy RAW processing makes up for that. Maybe you're just looking for feedback on what your processing technique has done to these images though. If that's the case, I suppose there's nothing entirely offensive about the treatment you've given most of these except that they all either suffer from oversharpening or from flare/blown highlights. The highlights in particular make these look like they were taken with a cheap point and shoot camera. I'd work on diminishing that sort of thing by either doing bracket and blends or by upgrading your camera/lens.

SeikoLiz

location:
21061
Gender: Male

The beast with those four dirty paws

Re: Trying new RAW development software...
<Reply # 6 on 3/6/2012 12:57 PM >

Posted by micro
I don't think the photos are all that interesting. It seems you've put too much thought into the processing and not enough into the composition, lighting and subject matter of the photo itself. Certainly these aren't images that should require "hours of tweaking." I understand that post-processing can often be half the fun in photography, but none of these images really work well to begin with. No amount of fancy RAW processing makes up for that.

Maybe you're just looking for feedback on what your processing technique has done to these images though. If that's the case, I suppose there's nothing entirely offensive about the treatment you've given most of these except that they all either suffer from oversharpening or from flare/blown highlights. The highlights in particular make these look like they were taken with a cheap point and shoot camera. I'd work on diminishing that sort of thing by either doing bracket and blends or by upgrading your camera/lens.

That last paragraph is spot on with what I was looking for. Compositionally speaking I know these are all weak - they are the rejects from shoots I completed literally MONTHS ago. Decent shots, just not particularly interesting.

I've been trying to play around with Viewer 2's gradation settings to see how they interact with exposure. Getting an agreeable histogram is actually not all that hard, but too much gradation (key to a balanced histogram) results in some pretty objectionable noise. In practice with some recent shooting I've taken to intentionally underexposing a scene, pumping it up maybe 1/3 stop on the exposure tweak and then introduce the touch of 10% gradation to pull out the shadows without compromising the highlights any further. It's a weird process and really just needs to be done shot by shot.

As for sharpening I dropped the detail retention to prevent those ugly halos. It was funny, any texture of high contrast produced a halo with made the histogram look like the whole image was just a giant white blob.

Bracket and blending I'm steering clear of, I don't need the overwhelming dynamic range of it or HDR, I'd rather have the windows blow out to white in most cases anyway (it's a look I've come to like in most cases). Camera and lens... yeah, they don't need any upgrades, I just need to learn how to process the RAWs responsibly. Always room for improvement. Even a D800E would make a shitty image in the wrong hands. :B

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