Fred Miranda Offline Admin Upload & Sell: On
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waardij wrote:
After reading about it here, I installed the ND app. Amazing. Not only the long exposure emulation (which seems to work really well), but the total absents of noise is incredible. Had used multiple exposures before, to reduce noise, but it is a bit tedious to do it all manual. Here it is all simple and you get a single RAW file. The only thing that surprises me a bit is that it can not be combined with silent shutter. Making a large number of exposures to get a single file does seems a bit heavy on the shutter (I you would use it all the time).
And lets hope the app will one day be combined with uncompressed raw. Not so much to reduce compression artifacts, which I would expect to be reduced by the averaging, but to get 14 bits rather then 13. The noise floor is so low that you could really use 14 bits (even 16, if that was possible)....Show more →
Before this app, I used to take 8 or 16 shots for a 3-4 stop ND effect. It's very time consuming to average the images in post even with a powerful computer. At 32 shots, It would take me about 15 minutes to get a final output back to Lightroom and it would be a Tiff instead of a RAW.
If you have lenses that can't use filters or simply don't want to carry them around, the Smooth Reflections app is IMO the best app Sony offers.
Do a test with 16 shots and increase increase exposure to +4EV. There is no noise!!! That is because you get ridiculously high SNR with super low ISO equivalents.
There are benefits of doing it manually though. If you get a blurry frame, you can remove it from the averaging. Also, you can test the final output for different number of frames to see what works best for your image. You can also align all the frames before they get averaged. With the app, you can't go back and remove a frame from the sequence. There is also no aligning so you must have a very sturdy tripod and not a lot of wind. I don't find any of this to be an issue though as if you were using a real ND filter, you would have to take the same precautions.
I've read some comments about the app applying noise reduction. That is just not the case. The noise reduction happens from medium averaging and all the detail is preserved (see my samples above). Just divide the ISO by the number of shots to find the equiv. ISO.
I'm not sure how Sony did it. If must do the averaging on the fly and we get a final image right after the last frame. (No waiting for processing)
Also, keep in mind that you can use a 2-3 stop ND filter in conjunction with this app. With a 3-stop filter for example, you get 6-stop equiv. output with only 8 shots. It may seem not to make sense since you are using filter anyways but it's much easier to compose/focus with a 3-stop than with a 6/10-stop filter. There is also much less color cast.
I find this app more useful than the Sky HDR for my needs. That is because if you ETTR your single file or in high contrasty situations bracket ETTR, you will get enough DR for a single shot or better results using the Lightroom HDR option when bracketing. The benefit of the app is setting different apertures for the exposures. That is cool.
Gradual NDs were very useful in the film days but today we have better options.
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