MJWong wrote:
Yeah, I'v had the same results with setting it to Auto. Its a lot better for you to actually view the scene and determine what level to use. Once you get the hang of it though its pretty damn cool. Its pretty much in camera exposure blending up to 2 stops.
400% means that its under exposing the image by 2 stops to protect the highlights and then boosting the shadows. Heres a little test you can try. Set it to 400% BUT, shoot JPEG + RAW. The Dynamic Range option does not affect the RAW image in the same way it does JPEG. You will see the RAW image that is produced before the shadows are fixed in camera to produce the JPEG. Now take the RAW and play with the Fill Light slider and you will see that you can get it close to the JPEG.
Had I used the 400% setting for my seagull photo above, the seagulls in that patch of sunlight would not have been blown out because the camera would have under exposed everything by 2 stops and then brightened up the shadows to match what you see now. It would have been a more ever exposure. The downside I find to it is that sometimes it can make your image look too flat since it compresses the contrast of a scene.
So in short..
If the highlights in your scene are 1 stop too bright use 200%
If the highlights in your scene are 2 stops too bright use 400%
The other downside aside from reduced contrast (which can be added back in later in LR/PS) is that it will generate noise in the shadows because of the under-exposure. I think that's why I get these ISO boosts on the 400% shots I took.
I think Sony does the same thing with their compacts too - I played around with the 5N yesterday and it has some DR boost options. I assume that's the same thing.
Canon and Nikon use the same thing. The Canon version is called Highlight Tone Priority.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention the minimum ISO values used at each DR setting. When you set DR to 400% is will use a minimum of ISO 800 and at 200% is will use a minimum or ISO 400. Thats how they get the latitude in order to boost the shadows after. It depends how deep the shadows are but most of the times I can get it out noise free.
deadwolfbones: Thanks. It took a while because he was visibly nervous seeing me tinker with my camera. After a while he couldn't resist his BBM and forgot I was there.
Had the X100 almost a month from now, traveled to Hong kong and Vietnam with it. Turned out to be amazing travel camera, indeed. There was couple of times when i thought of a longer FL but i just took the picture and then cropped it - the resulting image blew me away with its sharpness!
p.s. i find the colors of the x100's jpegs EXTREMELY pleasant. all they need is just additional sharpening - and that's all! The overall tonality, wb and everything else is spot on!
The in-camera settings I'm working with now for jpegs seem to give me great ooc classic Fuji color, sharpness and tonality. The auto WB in particular seems to work very well. I did notice though that setting the WB to a specific Kelvin temp can be problematic as compared to either using Auto or Fine WB. Here is what I'm using:
Astia, med. high for color, med. soft for both highlight and shadow tone and low for noise (that gives super sharp jpegs at the std sharpness setting ooc.), auto WB or fine, DR 100 and SRGB color space (unfortunately until the Adobe RGB space is fixed for jpegs). The only post processing required is to occasionally desaturate the green a bit and, depending on the scene, increase the contrast in the shadows (I would rather get more detail in the jpeg and later increase contrast than degrade the file by doing the opposite.) I do wish Fuji would resurrect their decent raw converter which would allow exporting files using in-camera film simulation settings. As it is now, one can do so from a RAW directly within the camera but that's not a very good solution from a workflow standpoint.
