mortyb wrote:
Sure, looking forward to what you can make of it.
Morten, I tried and tried on weekend. Always failing to get the correct green. Then I started to check my own images and I found out that these ferns always turn to "green with yellow tint" when sunlight shines to them. However when they are in pure shadow, or when there is thick cloud coverage the green is just right. Maybe current sensors with their green and red channel mixed so much just can't reproduce the current shade when original light is having lots of red (=direct or almost direct sunshine)
Also check it from other aspect; asked from my friend who knows a lot of biology (and ferns) and the colour of species of fern may change based on time of summer and the ground the plants are living in - thou the changes in colour should be minimal.
Lesson learned after spending 4+ hours about this subject... I'll not evaluate webimage colors as much in future - or if I do then I'll do it in winter...
Few comments from past few pages:
- Henela, great location you found (Storforsen), in better light it could give absolute wonderful images
- Lieutenant Z, your strong colors in PP suit very well for the graffities, the ones on past 10 pages have been fun to watch
- Ronny, 21 is difficult to shoot landscapes (personal opinion) if you don't have lots of elevation changes or something you can show in foreground. Like you I have carried it thousands of times in camerabag without never using it, however finally found one place with HUGE trees and crazy elevation changes (steep cliffs), I would have been really disappointed there if I would have not bring 21 with me. However can't post pictures since I'm swapping disks to my RAID-system and computer has been copying files past few days and it will continue few more days before I can do anything with it...
Carl Zeiss Planar T* 1,4/85 @ f/11, HDR(1/10s, 1/30s and 1/100s), ISO 100 - larger - I really enjoy shooting landscapes with 85 Planar, most of the time I prefer rendering of P85 to MP100, even MP100 is "technically" much more "perfect" lens
Samuli, good luck with the RAID repair. I was so nervous with the long reconstruction times that I replaced my old Drobo with a newer Drobo S. I am not sure I would recommend this particular model, but it has dual redundancy which is a great tension-easer while rebuilding.
I don't know if you are reading that thread, but Bernhard (alba63) and I were out shooting D3, D800 and 5DII this past weekend, and we did some comparison of the rendering of reds, and it quickly became obvious that 1) the colour of these cameras owes as much to colour profiles as to sensors, and 2) sun has a nasty effect on the rendering of reds.
I intend to spend some time making a good profile for my D800.
@Samuli i really like your forest photography, especially the Taaborinvuori-set. I would like to do a bit more forest photography myself but haven't figured out what kind of light works best jet, any tips?
carstenw wrote:
Samuli, good luck with the RAID repair. I was so nervous with the long reconstruction times that I replaced my old Drobo with a newer Drobo S. I am not sure I would recommend this particular model, but it has dual redundancy which is a great tension-easer while rebuilding.
I don't know if you are reading that thread, but Bernhard (alba63) and I were out shooting D3, D800 and 5DII this past weekend, and we did some comparison of the rendering of reds, and it quickly became obvious that 1) the colour of these cameras owes as much to colour profiles as to sensors, and 2) sun has a nasty effect on the rendering of reds.
I intend to spend some time making a good profile for my D800....Show more →
What you mean by profile? Do you mean custom ICC-profile? I used to do those in the past, but the CFA (color filter array) in modern cameras are passing so much other color channel stuff through that I never could it get to work after 5D (original) and 1DmkIII. Whatever Apple/Adobe/Phase One are doing their products they work better than the profiles I have made myself (if we are talking about ICC profiles). With current camera's CFAs I gave up, at the time I didn't know it's the CFA, I just noticed the methods which I was able to use with 5D and 1DmkIII didn't work/worked less well with 5DmkII.
RAID: not a repair, I'm basically upgading from 1TB disks to 3TB disks. And doing same time major renewal to disksystems and backup systems. Also tried RAID NAS (iSCSI), but it's way too slow to be usable for anything else than backups which you can wait hours to finish. So lots of time (and disks) wasted on this but hopefully I figure out good solution soon.
Phillip - light & forest: it really doesn't matter, but if you look at this thread April/May (mine and Akul's postings) you can see that in dull light it's rather difficult to get anything useful done in forest - if you have the tools you can improve light in this kind of situation with big umbrella and wireless flash (if you are willing to carry those to forest AND you have somebody to hold it for you). Personally I prefer to shoot when sun is rather high and there are clouds, and then I'll wait and take photos when the edge of cloud (well shadow of it) passes my foregound/subject - this gives extra nice light, which is directional but soft. Then of course in some situations one can utilize the soft morning/evening light, but then sun is so low that in forest you will always have patches of light instead of evenly lit scene, but it's rather easy to make work.
Few more landscapes with 85:
Carl Zeiss Planar T* 1,4/85 @ f/5.6 , HDR(1/160s, 1/500s and 1/1600s), ISO 100 - larger
Carl Zeiss Planar T* 1,4/85 @ f/5.6 , HDR(1/160s, 1/500s and 1/1600s), ISO 100 - larger
Samuli Vahonen wrote:
What you mean by profile? Do you mean custom ICC-profile?
Yes, or in the case of Adobe products, the equivalent, whatever that may be. I know that the usual profiling has a low chance of making improvements, so in my opinion, there are two ways to go. Either create a separate profile for each lens type (maybe it is enough to make 2-3 profiles for all ZF.2 lenses...), lighting condition, etc., or go all out, learning way too much and trying to work at it like people like Joseph Holmes. I am not sure where I will end up, but I will at least try.
That is one approach, but colours change in different light. Metamerism and all that. The better amateur profiles are based on two or three shots in different light, but they probably still don't approach the Adobe LR4 profiles, or other raw developer profiles. Those companies have used the same cameras and put way more effort in... I do have an X-Rite ColorChecker Passport and will give it a shot with the LR plugin, but I don't expect anything usable to come from that. I think these sorts of things are better for single shots.
Yes, I guess you're right. I also have a CC Passport, I made a few profiles for my 5D2. But as I've said before, personally I'm more after a look than accuracy/neutrality. I've found Nikons own OOC to fit me quite well. What I've seen from the X-pro1 also look amazing in terms of color/tonality.
I quite like the Nikon look in general, and the D800 does seem to improve on the D3, but the reds in sunlight are problematic, and skin tones in general are not as romantic (or as wrong...) as Canon, so those are two areas I would like to tweak. Perhaps it is a better idea simply to learn how to fix these things in PP, but doing a proper profile for my copy of the camera has always appealed somehow...
carstenw wrote:
Yes, or in the case of Adobe products, the equivalent, whatever that may be. I know that the usual profiling has a low chance of making improvements, so in my opinion, there are two ways to go. Either create a separate profile for each lens type (maybe it is enough to make 2-3 profiles for all ZF.2 lenses...), lighting condition, etc., or go all out, learning way too much and trying to work at it like people like Joseph Holmes. I am not sure where I will end up, but I will at least try.
http://www.josephholmes.com/profiles.html
?? I'm still confused, I have used ICC-profiles with Adobe products past decade or so, they are mostly used with Adobe products... How we made profiles was more scientific than the approach you linked (somebody just massaging profiles). Our approach was based on:
- shooting Kodak Q60 target (used to be commercially available from many places, they did cost ~100USD)
- process RAW with standardized parameters (you need RAW conversion engine, which doesn't think for you and adjust stuff without you knowing about it)
- special action in PhotoShop created image in which each pixel corresponded one colorsquare in Q60 target
- VBA script in Excel calculated ICC-profile
- When this ICC-profile was applied to images shoot at same light & environment as the Q60 colours were extreme accurate
Naturally you need to take shot of the Q60 target in various different lights and environments (e.g. if you shoot in green forest light is much more green than it's in the city due to light passing through green leaves and reflecting from green things - environment can be as important as the light quality/type). There are commercial products doing the same - hopefully they create proper profiles these days. Back in the days profiles created by these commercial programs were rather poor compared to this non-commercial method. Some products use way too simple checker with only less than 20 squares to measure and create profile - that is WAY TOO LITTLE to create good quality profile.
One thing why you DON'T WANT TO DO this is that then your photos look neutral - to me the richness in photography is the light, reflections etc. and how they make my subjects to look like --> if I shoot in shadow at forest I want my photos to have certain green cast - if I would create perfect profile in such situation I would not have the cast and photo would look way different.
Carl Zeiss Distagon T* 1,4/35 @f/2.8, 1/s, ISO 100 - larger
Ah, this is interesting, I didn't realize there was a pipeline for creating ICC profiles for Adobe products! Actually, I am being inaccurate, I don't mean Photoshop, but Lightroom. I would like to get the profile in at the lowest level possible, i.e. the raw developer. I am only aware of ICC profiles for Lightroom for paper...
Interestingly, on the one hand you say that you are not interested in neutral profiles, on the other hand you dismiss Joseph Holmes, who has put a lot of work into making "beautiful" profiles
I also lean more towards the beautiful profiles. I would like to do the same kind of work (which not being as knowledgeable), as Kodak and Fuji must have done when designing their films' colour responses. I am willing to put a non-trivial effort into this over a long period, many months, or even into years, as long as I am reasonably sure that I can approach something I would prefer over stock profiles.
But maybe I should start by trying the Q60 approach, and maybe buy a profile or two from Joseph Holmes, and see what I think. Btw, X-Rite also has a ColorChecker SG Digital, with much more than 24 squares, and a good collection of skin tones, but it is more than 100 Euro:
carstenw wrote:
Ah, this is interesting, I didn't realize there was a pipeline for creating ICC profiles for Adobe products! Actually, I am being inaccurate, I don't mean Photoshop, but Lightroom. I would like to get the profile in at the lowest level possible, i.e. the raw developer. I am only aware of ICC profiles for Lightroom for paper...
Surely there must be way to use Lightroom in controlled professional manner. If it doesn't allow you to use ICC-profiles directly there must be some some plugin to do it.
carstenw wrote:
Interestingly, on the one hand you say that you are not interested in neutral profiles, on the other hand you dismiss Joseph Holmes, who has put a lot of work into making "beautiful" profiles
Well, engineer, mathematician, coder and artist in same persons doesn't always work that well...
carstenw wrote:
But maybe I should start by trying the Q60 approach, and maybe buy a profile or two from Joseph Holmes, and see what I think. Btw, X-Rite also has a ColorChecker SG Digital, with much more than 24 squares, and a good collection of skin tones, but it is more than 100 Euro:
You can't anymore go to this Kodak Q60 approach unless somebody has made commercial (or non commericial) computer program of this method. If I remember correctly the VBA-part stopped working with new MS Office versions (reason why I had Office 97 forever in one computer). Also the website of the author of method doesn't seem to be there anymore. I may have VMWare image of Windows system where this worked somewhere, unless it was on those backup disks, which disappeared when I had burglary on 2009 - thou don't know if so old VMware image is no longer compatible with current player.
Carl Zeiss Distagon T* 1,4/35 @ f/4, 1/8s, ISO 100 - larger
_972.jpg "2026 © Samuli Vahonen")
_972.jpg "2026 © Samuli Vahonen")
_972.jpg "2026 © Samuli Vahonen")
