ediblestarfish Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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chuck77 wrote:
Maybe part of the noise has to do with how the XT2 metered the scene. It chose a relatively fast shutter speed of 1/640s, and the ISO was only 200. Yet, I do agree that it looks a bit underexposed even though I had exposure compensation at -1/3 EV only. On the other hand, my style tends to be a bit darker like this too. I could use some speedlites or bring my strobes, but ultimately I've past that phase. Portraits with artificial lighting outdoors is just too unnatural for me, requires lugging around lots of equipment, and just makes things not so practical. Not to mention the stands, modifiers, etc, that are necessary.
I push my photos quite a bit in terms of colour mostly, and contrast. After I processed this file via Iridient Transformer again, and then also with Iridient+Lightroom, there was more detail indeed.
But, as soon as I apply my colour and contrast adjustments, the file starts to fall apart and the noise looks alot more apparent. Maybe this isn't the absolute best example photo to pick, but the noise seems high for such modest exposure settings.
I like that the skin tones in your version look smoother with fewer artifacts. It is more natural looking, but alot of the skin texture has gone missing. Maybe that's a good thing, for the naturally retouched look I suppose. When viewing any of these photos at less than 100% size, everything looks fine, but working on the files in Photoshop revealed quite a bit of limitations.
There are some studio portraits I took with the XT2 that also has this issue in the shadows, hair, etc. I'll try to dig one out. Anyway, here are the ones I processed using Iridient Transformer, and also with Iridient Transformer and Lightroom, both at 100%. Which one looks better?
There is some fuzziness around the top edge of her lips that I can't seem to fix.
Note: theses crops have not had my normal colour and contrast processing applied. I'll show that in the next post.
...Show more →
Personal preference so YMMV; I don't really like either, since the sharpening seems too high in both, but prefer #2 more than #1. The problem that I've had with X-Transformer again, is that it can not mask, and thus applies sharpening to everything, which adds additional noise to spots that should not have noise.
My image isn't actually less sharp or less noisy if I set the masking to 0, I simply elected to not to do that and to be very selective about sharpening the higher contrast areas that are in focus only. I didn't take away any detail, I just chose not to pull them out.
Honestly if you like to pick apart files, a larger sensor camera is going to be your best friend. You will have less noise when pushing in post, since there will be greater dynamic range (unless you shoot Canon--not much difference). Posterization will not be as quick to appear.
Base noise unfortunately, at similar DoF will not be very different. You'll have to stop aperture down more on FF, and then raise the ISO to compensate--which adds noise. There is still a slight advantage still, but frustratingly small. One of the reasons I left FF behind was this.
Sharpness on the other hand, is greatly boosted, as long as your lenses are decent. With similar lenses, no crop sensor is going to beat out FF of similar vintage. If you like that super crisp bite, I would suggest going FF. It's less noticeable in smaller prints, but still subtlety noticeable if you have a good printer. By the time you get to a full page of A4, it's pretty noticeable. If you tend to print larger a lot and produce few, but good images like landscape, I'd go FF. For me it's a minority of uses, and didn't make sense to keep that FF capability.
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