brainiac wrote:
Developed with DPP, no exposure adjustment necessary for the look I wanted, and therefore not underexposed. At 200 ISO a £2000 camera ought to be able to produce tidy shadows in this file, with no exposure adjustment.
It would be interesting - and convincing - to see a screen shot of the original histogram of the image when it was imported into your RAW conversion program - e.g. before any adjustments to the RAW defaults were made.
Would it be possible to post this?
EDIT: Oh, wait, if I understand correctly the histogram WAS posted. The histogram I saw shows a poorly exposed frame. While there are a few who disagree, many (I\'d say, with confidence, most) photographers using digital sensor cameras understand that the ideal is to determine exposure on the basis of capturing the most useful scene data and in keeping the data values as high as possible above the noise values (e.g. - a high signal to noise ratio), and then working in post to get the \"look\" you want in the print.
The histogram I see earlier in this thread is shows luminosity virtually entirely in the lower half of the histogram range. This has several negative effects. It limits the amount of data available to describe the luminosity range of the image; it reduces the ratio between the noise (that will be found in any digital image) and the \"signal\" or data representing the image.
A better and more appropriate way to use DSLR exposure to capture a low noise image of this scene would have been to \"expose to the right.\" Many know what this means, but for those who don\'t or who prefer to misinterpret: select an exposure that will record lightest values as high as possible without blowing them out or otherwise losing detail.
The method used to determine the exposure in the test image in this thread would have been perfect... for color transparencies. It is dead wrong for a digital capture of a low contrast scene.
If the complaint comes down to \"when I expose on my digital camera like I did when I shot slides, sometimes the results aren\'t so great,\" well, yes, can\'t argue with that. But that is pretty meaningless in terms of system performance. (As an argument it is also weak because it works both ways - in other words when I \"expose to the right\" and get a good low noise print from the same scene, I _could_ trash film by saying \"if I expose slide film this way the image looks awful.\")
Bottom line. While I originally posted a note of concern about the banding of the noise in the original photograph, if the histogram shown earlier in this thread is the same as or close to the original exposure histogram...
... the problem is with the exposure not the camera.
Dan
Dan
Feb 05, 2009 at 10:39 AM
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