Since I’m the tech for the photo lab at the campus I work at, I get to try anything the department buys. Have tried everything out there, and from an overall usage standpoint, Lightroom wins out. Second is DarkTable. It’s free, has an okay DAM. Has all the features of LR, just not as cleanly organized. Some features aren’t quite as user friendly because of their name, but once you figure them out (YouTube has many videos), it’s pretty damn good. Lastly, it has a ton of lens profiles from the lenses we use the most. From a pure image quality standpoint, ON1 and DxO are on top.
leighton w wrote:
Haven't tied DxO yet. I've tried On1, Capture One Pro, Alien Skin EX3, Luminar and Affinity. The one thing they all have in common is that you have to use layers. I've never cared for layers, that's why I love LR.
Alien Skin EX3 doesn't require you to use layers, but it sure makes life easier if you do. Layers make it so much easier to go back and modify an adjustment without losing everything else you've done since making that adjustment.
My wife and I took a quick trip to the mountains today and I was bound and determined to use my MF lenses a lot. As it turns out, this is the only photo I took with a MF lens on a digital camera. I also took one using my Nikon S2 with 50mm lens, but it will have to wait until I finish the roll of film and process it. This one was taken with the X-E1 and 24mm f/2.8 AI.
spoupard wrote:
My wife and I took a quick trip to the mountains today and I was bound and determined to use my MF lenses a lot. As it turns out, this is the only photo I took with a MF lens on a digital camera. I also took one using my Nikon S2 with 50mm lens, but it will have to wait until I finish the roll of film and process it. This one was taken with the X-E1 and 24mm f/2.8 AI.
I am disabled and on a fixed income so can’t get too wild with hardware or software. This is not the only reason I shoot manual though - I love using and maintaining old things and think the old Nikkors are superior in most ways to modern lenses. After Kodak stopped making Kodachrome 25, I stopped shooting for years.
Finally, because I had one item on my bucket list (to take my two daughters out west to inspire them with natural beauty), I took my eldest daughter out west a year ago. I decided to buy us each a camera, so I got her a D5500 (she is very petite) and I got a D750. I taught her photography and she shot all her shots in manual mode (though mostly autofocus). She loves her Nikon. It changed my life because I rediscovered creativity (I am a scientist and teacher of many years) and found something I could still do (also a music composer who can no longer play my keyboards for more than a few minutes and it is so painful I rarely do now). Lightroom is so easy to use once you get past the import interface, and I found that if I expose to the right without blowing highlights, LR can bring back the shadow detail in the extremely low-grain D750 images such that it was a revelation for me. Between LR and the D750, and a few other things like tripods and nodal slides, I have everything I need with my old lenses. LR is too expensive for me (as is photography) but worth it I guess. It has saved my life.
One of my least used lenses on the D810 last night. I left it in the garage with a motion trigger, trying to catch the Mini spirits checking out the new daily driver after I got done with the paint polishing and coating.
24mm f/2.8 AIS on D810
f/8.0 10s ISO 64 on tripod with radio remote trigger. lighting is a home made LED light strip and this failed shot is the most interesting result. It needs more work
Other than Lightroom, the other piece of software that I have found life-changing is True Depth of Field Pro, or TrueDoF Pro. It's a smartphone app for iOS, and an Android version is in the works. If you like zone focusing with your old lenses, this app adds an order of magnitude of joy to the experience. It enables me to instantly see the precise f-stop and hyperfocal distance for whatever region I need in focus. Sure, I can always focus 1/3 of the way between the two extremes of the in-focus region, but which f-stop is sufficient? And depending on what lens/camera I'm using, what size circle of confusion is needed to obtain the level of resolution required? This app does all that instantly, and as you move the f-stop slider or distance slider, everything is shown graphically in an instantly-understood way. Brilliant, genious, indispensable app for guys like me who adore zone focusing.
Now if only my camera could tell me the exact distance to the plane of focus, that would be awesome!
Interesting takes for ON1. I’ve tried several demos over some period and always had crashes.
I like LR best and since I candi D800 files, and ver 6 will do the m43 cams I currently have I may just jump to LR6 and stay there. Right now I have to convert my m43 raws to dng to use LR5.x
Dan that’s quite a story, encouraging to hear your perseverance to continue to express your creativity.
Loving the shot of Dunsky Castle, Gary.
The dog in the rear of the car is priceless. Amazing that the dog just stays there.
Since it’s slow and I have been clicking photos with the M mainly with some M glass, I thought I would share this nice site I found. Seems to be some interesting reading here. I have enjoyed the quotes, fun to read!
Last weekend we went for in short city trip in the north of Holland; Leeuwarden, the capital of the province Friesland.
This is "De Oldehove", an unfinished church tower in the medieval centre It leans more than the tower of Pisa in Italy (1,99 meter).
Construction of the Late Gothic tower began in 1529, after the citizens of Leeuwarden demanded a tower taller than the one in the city of Groningen, the Martinitoren (about 60km to the east). In charge were Jacob van Aken and, after his death, Cornelis Frederiksz.
During construction, the tower began to sag, which the builders tried to compensate for by inserting several "kinks", but the project was stopped somewhere in 1532/1533.
