Gochugogi wrote:
...most modern humans never print and view everything on phone and computer screens...
I rarely print. My method of looking at my photos is to use slide show and screen saver software on my computer or displayed on the TV for patient friends. I like the Ken Burns effect in iPhoto (when it works) which randomly zooms into an image and then slowly pans across it. This can have the same effect as pixel peeping at times. However, my image sets include scanned slides and negatives as well as digital images that aren\'t perfect captures but save some memory or scene I\'m fond of. The digital images were captured by family on P&S and my images include several G series, 10D, 40D, and both 5Ds as well as the 7D. As Gochugogi says, even the P&S is an improvement over film. Among the XD and XXD images that I\'ve taken there is more variation in my capture technique than there is among camera bodies.
Noise tolerance is personal taste and if the 7D doesn\'t cut if for you then get a 5D. If 5D frame rate and AF don\'t cut it for you then get a 1DIV or 1DX. If 5D crop factor doesn\'t cut it then buy a big white. Its only money and there are a lot of choices.
As the images above demonstrate, the 7D is capable of great photography and at refurbished prices is a lot of camera for the money. Like the G10, the 7D is a high density sensor and is noise prone at the pixel level. I shoot RAW and aggressively apply NR in the RAW converter and apply only light to moderate sharpening at .5 to 1 pixel width. Unlike most of my 5D images, I have to tailor the settings to each image after enlarging to %200. In Photoshop (Elements 9) I have to be careful with levels and highlight/shadow adjustment compared to the 5D. With landscapes, for example, I\'ll often bicubic downsample to 4620x2600 (16:9) or 4380x2740 (1.6) 12 MP images. With 5D2 sometimes I\'ll downsample and sometimes I\'ll crop to this level depending on how well things look at pixel level. Sometimes I can even crop a 7D image. At this point I\'ll inspect the sky regions and perhaps apply some selective NR to the sky areas. I do this with 5D images too. (The magic selector tool makes this pretty easy.) Finally, I\'ll see if I need to apply a little more sharpening (.3 pixel size, 150 level to start) perhaps with the previously selected sky region deselected (inverse select function).
I didn\'t mean to be quite this long winded but I thought I\'d offer folks some things to try. I\'m still learning how to get the most from the 7D. I\'d appreciate other suggestions on how to process.
If this all sounds like too much trouble, then the camera\'s jpeg converter is pretty good. Maybe all the picture warrants is to be shot as a jpeg. With the G10, I\'m pretty hard pressed to improve on the internal jpegs.
Dec 11, 2011 at 03:30 PM
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