Across the Generations

I’ve managed tp keep up with the daily photo regime, by not being too concerned about what I photograph. More realistic I’m just letting myself see something as a photo, rather than trying to go out for a specific shot. The back story here was I was re-oragning where I shore my cameras and just had these out on an untidy desk so I just moved them outside. Arranged them “collaborativel”.

Ironically the photo I choose to post was taken with my Cannon EOS, not one of the Penatx family.

Viva La Difference

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A lot of folk ask me why I shot with two different cameras. The simple reason is I mainly use the Canon if I am likely to also take a movie, or it is to document my consulting work but the Pentax remains my “goto” camera. So I’ve started to take a few comparisons with each in different situations. What I can see (and have known for a while) is the Canon colour is always warmer, which actually does a good job with making portraits more complimentary, but it might not be a as true to the subject as the Pentax capture. The other observation is the canon tends to show more contrast. So the JPEG straight out of the camera can have more immediate appeal.

Enough to change my mind of which is my “goto” camera NOT YET!

.JPG vs RAW (.PEF) vs .DNG

arning, I must preface this post with the advice that this is very much my personal view, based on my experience rather that on a calibrated benchmark comparison. I have the choice of using jpeg, two types of propriety RAW  and .DNG as an alternative Raw format on my Pentax K20D. I have found the decision as to which format to standardize on hard to resolve and opted to save both RAW+jpeg where there is the such an option. So here is a little about my (in)decisions and why.

All my current and past digital cameras and cameraphones have all captured .jpeg files and my photo collection is dominated by that format. I have come to appreciate picasa as the very best way to manage jpeg files, its fast, simple and behaves. My many mistress project has lead me to see that previewing jpeg thumbnails is by far my preferred way to cull and organise my photos as I load them. At this stage whilst I might do a little cropping I tend not to do any elaborate post processing. Occasionally at this stage I will email images and very occasionally upload them to the net which generally require resized jpeg version (again picasa does this well) without much photo retouching.

There is also no doubt in my mind that you can coax much more out of RAW files than you can get out of the equivalent jpeg. The reasons for this is buried in the image "development" process happening in the camera, to take the sensor readings and produce an image. There are several steps, demosaicing of the Bayer array, white balance assumption, tone mapping, colour saturation and contrast, then image compression before it is written to the camera memory card.. Probably the biggest limitation is that the image must be packed into an 8 bit representation. Each step requires interpretive decision about how to preform the development and many are not easily recovered if the steps lead to less than desirable processing. That’s where having access to the original information in a RAW format file is a big advantage, but now the steps must be specifically undertaken by the photographer, which takes time and experience. Often a lot of time! The jpeg representation, or at least a suitable small sized thumbnail of it, is also needed at the camera itself to be display on the LCD screen on the back of the camera. 

Pentax JPEG *** (5.9MB)	Pentax JPEG **** (10.0MB)

There is a trade off between the time take to write the large RAW files and the smaller jpeg files, which can mean that you can take fewer images per second, because there can be a bottleneck writing to the card, When you just shoot raw, the jpeg development steps are likely to be run anyway, not only for the image on the LCD screen but most Raw files also include this jpeg thumbnail, for use in quickly previewing the Raw file contents. So in RAW+jpeg both file formats must be written to you to your memory card and it is then just an issue of time taken to write both and extra space required. So fewer unique images fit on the memory card before it is full. Rather than opt for a larger memory card. I've chosen to have several 4 & 8GB cards that have faster read write access, so other than having to change cards more often I probably don't see much difference. There is one exception which is tracking birds in flight and I'll discuss this in a future post.

Pentax RAW  .PEF (13.2MB)	Pentax RAW  .DNG (23.1MB)

I have a Pentax which is one of the few manufacture that offer DNG as an alternative RAW format, Leica and Hasselblad are the only others I know of that can save to DNG in the camera. DNG can have one significant advantage, in my view, the files can be 15 to 20% smaller than the equivalent RAW files if they are lossless compressed. This is may be why many photographers have chosen to convert their RAW files to DNG on import. Anyone that has tried the convert on import into lightroom will know that this is simple but a very time consuming process, On a full card this is not just time for a quick coffee this is tme to have dinner and some. However when I choose that format on my Pentax K20D camera, the DNG files are uncompressed and they are almost double the size of the PEF files. Against this there are some differences, just differences not improvements, in how the images are rendered particularly in lightroom and I can't see any advantage capturing in DNG

Cannon JPEG (4.5MB)	Canon RAW .CR2 (16.8MB)

Because of the time/file size trade-off I have stuck with using more compressed versions of the jpeg files (on my Pentax this is the JEPG *** rather than the uncompressed JPEG**** format) when using the RAW+jpeg. This compressed option is the only one available on my canon when using RAW+jpeg. The images posted above are all jpeg files of reduced size, so they can be dispalyed on the web. So it is not possible to show the subtle details and differences here. I have also uploaded the unedited files to my google+ JPEG vs RAW vs DNG photo album. If you are interested this may given extra insight.

So I hope you understand why I choose to store RAW+jpeg and have opted to stick with the PEF format (and .CR2) rather than use DNG from the camera. I do use the DNG format in some special circumstances but that’s for another post.This discussion is prompted by to my thinking longer term focus

 Thanks again to Jessica Hische for her great drop caps.

More experiments with RAW on Google+

Despite the fact that I couldn't yet see any compelling reason to go over to uploading RAW images into google+, I still wanted to have a play and see what it can offer. So I went an took a couple of pictures of the gingko in my cretaceous garden. I had been a bit worried because it has not spouted any leaves and it its well into spring. Luckily they appeared two days ago and are developing well. The first set where taken with my pentax, which lets me save files in either the pentax propriety raw format .pef or adobe's .dng format, I've also uploaded the .jpg  version captured at the same time. I was actually a bit disappointed because whilst I thought the background was out of focus it was a bit strong (more on that later)

I then took another two photos with my canon this time with the aperture wide open to dramatize the depth of field blur.

Normally I upload to google+ via picasa but trying to upload raw files from it triggers a jpeg version to be generated in the process, not what I wanted so I decided to do this via my google drive. You can also upload via your browser, but that is a bit more work. Whereas yesterday auto enhance seemed to be toggled off, today it was toggled on, so this turned out to be a fairly low effort way to get half decent renditions of my photos. The downside is the background sync from my google drive took several minutes, so its a case of copy to the google drive locally and go and get a cup of coffee.

Whilst once I was very interested in the "auto fix" features of photo processing software I've come to prefer to tweak the sliders myself. This of course take time. The google+ plus path is classic google (I'm feeling lucky) where its all done for you behind the scenes. I must admit it isn't bad but I still prefer to do my own adjustments so I had a look how I might be able to fix the background dominance. I used the .pef file and I chose the selective adjust option which allows you to select a part of the image and this will find similar pasrt of the image to be selectively processed, You can adjust the size of a circular area to work with and the effect feathers off outside that (its shown in red above). You can also have more than one selective area. It does not offer blurring as an adjustment but I was able to decrease contrast and reduce saturation to take the background dominance away. Achieving something closer to what I remember in the view finder as I was photographing.

I'm impressed there is a lot of power here, if you are already have good software for processing RAW files I'm sure you'll be able to do better.  However if you are new to RAW, have it on you camera but have been afraid to try it, give google+ photo and google drive a go, they are free after all, you just need a google account and be using a chrome browser. Oh that's right, also make sure you have a good data plan first because uploading the large RAW files will be a bandwidth hog.

Swanning around

Here is a comparison of some basic enhancement of a RAW format photo using the PENTAX PHOTO Laboratory software versus Lightroom 4. The differences may be minor but I do feel the bottom photo captures the delicacy of the winter afternoon light the way I wanted too. I have often wondered why my JPEG image that my Pentax writes at the same time as the RAW file (a .PEF format) comes out “punchier” and “brighter” than the RAW image, even with a fair bit of tweaking. Maybe I’m not tweaking enough or doing the wrong tweaking!  Raw Therapee (a great open source program) seemed to do a better job, but a fair bit of fiddling was often required. The new lightroom BASIC development panel is shown on the right (and it is the only panel I used). The main contribution to the difference is in the White balance, which I changed to Auto (and I’m not even sure what that does, but it has lifted a green grey hazy colour cast from the background). Next i used the clarity slider Opps I probably gave away a big secret here. The clarity slider, which enhances the contrast in midtones, first appeared in in Lightroom 1.1 but was modified in Lightroom 3, and again now in 4 beta is a definitely a “secret tweak” among Lightroom fans I know. It seems to be a magic way to lift any photo, with the result a lot of folk always seem cranked it over to +100, +50ish is enough for me. Then a tiny bit of adjustment to the tonal strength of the highlights and shadows and there it was the photo I wanted to take, all on a single panel in a few seconds.

Further Investigation of AutoFocus up close

My previous investigation only wetted my appetite to find out more about the close up focusing on my android phone. So I reinstalled PRO Paint, something of a mistake (see the footnote) and also grabbed my Pentax DSLR and my wife’s FujiPix (a nifty little point and shoot) and I went out to take some things in the garden up really close. I was primarily interested in the difference in depth of field, as the lens got smaller. I was expecting the depth of field to get wider on the smaller cameras and largely it did. This narrower depth of field on my big DSLR does give a pleasant effect where the subject is in focus but the background blurred. Also these photos are clearer and possibly closer to the true colour saturation. I did use the special macro mode on The FujiPix and my touch and hold method for my HTC camera. What I did notice and I have seen before is that some subjects (eg purple & white flowers) give autofocus a hard time. I suspect these subjects don’t have sharp enough contrast in themselves for the autofocus to play with. See the single lavender bloom (second row) I was trying to focus on the petals of that bloom and only the DSLR let me do that (after a lot of ranking back and forth of the lens) the other cameras just focused on the foliage behind. 

CONCLUSION: You’ll still do better with marco subjects if you go for a DSLR and exploit the depth of field to highlight your subject,  All cameras did a good enough job to get the detail. Some white & lighter purple subjects are harder to get auto-focus to work.

Pentax D20	FujiPix Z30	Android HTC	Android PRO Paint
			Not Taken *
			Not  Taken *
			Not Taken *

* The PRO Paint app kept crashing my phone, whenever it used the flash which it did unnecessarily, so I gave up and uninstalled it again.

Comparing a Cameraphone & DSLR I

vs
Which is which?

All things Pentax

When I was reviewing Windows Live Photo I was referred to this site in a search for some extra Codec files. Having a look around I found it is a nice one stop place for Pentax owners giving links to all the latest firmware updates, software , drivers and manuals.

If you haven’t already found your camera manual in PDF format. I strong suggest you do so now (look for a CD that came with your camera first or just google the word manual followed by your camera model) and then copy it to the USB key that you keep in your camera bag.

You don’t keep a USB memory key in your camera bag? Then read this.

Rawing Still Life

This almost painterly image came about as a the comparing the processing of some of my RAW files using different software. One of te packages i was “testing” was a trial version of the latest Photoshop Elements. There beside the image on the right hand side is a filter dialogue box and it is set to Artistic (the alphabetically first option) and there is a nice looking apple  and if you move your mouse pointer over it you see it called paint daubs. To temping for me and the image above is the result.

Ok back to the actual comparison, well to be honest there is very little in it. The original photo, artificial flowers taken with strong natural light backlighting, in the top left is the version my camera also creates when I take a RAW image (because I told it too). I liked the lighting and think is is a good image for a comparison of RAW capabilities. The next three are the results you get when you run each piece of software using it auto process or fix option. All three RAW converts have less distinct noise in the background and from there the differences are subtle. Raw Therapee is by far the simplest and fastest to use. The Pentax Lab result is still the one I like best but the Photoshop Elements version is pretty much the same, just slower and a two step process to reach (and the luminosity noise fix is not part of the default).

I am still not totally convinced the extra load for “processing or converting” RAW version is really all that justified in routine snap shot stuff. For difficult exposure, like low light or really special subjects and fleeting moments I now usually hit the RAW button but for the rest of the time I am still likely to be taking JPEG, getting a lot more photos on my memory card and I doubt most folk will even notice.