Fuji raw files and Lightroom/ACR versus Fuji software

We recently discussed the quality of Lightroom/ACR compared to Fuji's own software (Finepix Viewer/Studio and HyperUtility) since Thom Hogan claimed in his S5pro test that only Fuji's own software can extract the maximum detail from Fuji raw data (and even though he clearly said its only a slight difference and that doesn't cause me to have sleepless nights, I still wanted to know).

I've picked an "independent" raw file (from rawsamples.ch) and made a comparison (the example raw file is not really good because its been made wide open). I've set both Lightroom and Finepix Studio to the most neutral settings that are possible (no sharpening, no noise reduction) and picked an area from the photo that has a lot of fine detail. Please compare the result using Lightroom and Finepix Studio. I can't really say that Fuji's own software does a better job (a potential flaw of the comparison might be that I made screenshots in the 100% view of LR and FS instead of exporting/saving the file - you never know what the screen rendering of the software does).

However... during the comparison, I made another observation: Finepix Studio removes a little bit of chromatic abberation (and there's no control for that feature). I used Lightroom's compare feature for an illustration (that file is a little bit big, 1300x1000 pixels so you better have a large monitor:-) of the effect (however, when manually fixed with Lightroom, the result is better, and the chromatic abberation can be removed almost completely). Which of course leaves the question what else the Fuji software does that can not be turned off for a real comparison. :-)

As the snow flies...

Oh yes, the title sounds like Elvis. :-)

Some days ago we were hit by the first snow, which was quite beautiful. Sitting in the warm living room and looking outside onto the street, where snowflakes were dancing in the strong wind...



The first shot was taken at ISO800 with 1/80s, the second one at ISO100 with 1/10s. I prefer the second shot because I can recognize the force of the wind in it.

There were no real "colors" that would actually add to the photo. The snowflakes look better in the black & white conversion, because they're not colored by the orange-yellowish lamp light.

November afternoon

The afternoon light in late November has a special quality. The days are very short already (its dark at 5pm by now thanks to that idiotic "daylight saving" time shift we go through twice a year) and you get that warm sunset light in the early afternoon already.



These shots were taken in the Ettenau, a nearby floodplain forest area on the austrian side of the Salzach river. Its a place that we visit frequently because its very quiet, and our dog finds a lot of wonderful smells that she can follow there. :-)


I absolutely had to :) push the white balance a little bit to reproduce the feeling of the warm afternoon light, but other than that, not much post processing was done.

I mention this because I often wonder how much post-processing really goes into some landscape & scenery photos. I've never seen a green sky or red mist, yet there are highly praised landscape photos "out there" that show exactly that (I don't place a link here because I refuse to support that). I don't know. Is it really necessary to create catchy and artificial "photos" to draw some attention to them? I think there's a difference between carving out the essence of a scenery and fixing common shortcomings of photography in general (like the "fix blue tint" thing in the previous post) VS creating a complete altered version of reality. And sometimes its a thin line indeed.

Fixing blue haze with LR's Split Toning

OK, this is a tip only for the Lightroom users, but since I'm using this trick a lot since I discovered it I just have to share it.

A common problem with "my type" of photography (during trekking tours in the mountains, in bright daylight) is the blueification of the shadows. Its a natural phenomenon, all right, but when you use the tele range to extract a portion of a scene in the distance there's often a blue foggy haze over it that just can't be eliminated completely (a polarizing filter sure helps, but its not the cure-all).

Taking photos of objects farther away often results in pictures with not enough contrast, so I play around with the contrast and the black point a little bit, and because of that, the saturation in the shadows increases, making the blue haze even stronger! Darnit...

One fix for that would be adjusting the white balance, but most often I do not want to render the entire scene warmer, but just get rid of the blue haze in the shadows.

And thats were, you guessed it, Lightroom's "Split Toning" feature (its in the develop module, of course... need I say that?) comes into play. You can tone the light and the shadow parts independently with this function, with a saturation and colour of your choice, and alter the balance between light and shadows.

Just compare the two photos shown here. The first one is the "initial" raw conversion with a little bit more contrast and a black point adjustment. Look especially at the shadow side of the mountain (my beloved Sonntagshorn, by the way), you can easily see the blue haze there.

In the second picture, just a little bit toning of the shadows was added. To fix blue the color of choice is yellow of course, it doesn't take a lot of saturation either, and hey presto, that blue haze in the shadows is gone, the scene is much more what I remembered the day was like - and the biggesst difference to a simple white balance adjustment: the color of the sky has not changed at all!

And here's what the Split Toning panel in Lightroom looks for this type of adjustment:

Lightroom prefers DNG

Originally I wanted to write an article with the title "Things I hate about Lightroom 2" - and every other item in a list of about 10 points would've been "The Performance!" ;-)

But then it occurred to me that I made the switch to the S5pro together with the update to Lightroom 2... hmmm... and LR is definitely faster with JPEG (and older NEF raw data from my D70s). I noticed a particular performance difference in the NEF files that I converted to DNG a while ago. LR felt much snappier, somehow.

So I converted today's set of photos to DNG, and guess what - LR is faster. I did not convert the files to linear data, I selected the "preserve original raw data" option. The difference is VERY noticeable. The "double-click on the handle to reset the slider" feature that became completely unusable and unreliable in LR after the update to v2.1 works just fine when the file is in DNG format instead of Fuji's RAF format (I still believe that the behaviour of LR2.1 is a bug that was introduced with fixing another slider related bug because it worked as expected in LR2.0).

Another interesting aspect is the file size: Fuji's RAF files always contain the full 12mpx data with 14bit depth and are uncompressed - each raw file is about 25MB. Converted to DNG, my test file shrunk to something like 15MB (using the DNG lossless compression). Thats nice, but not ground-shaking (and with today's harddisk prices, it doesn't really matter). However, when I checked the option to include the original rawfile into the DNG, the resulting file was only 31MB in size - very strange, but since I really want to preserve the original rawfiles that may be the route I'm picking.

It would be interesting to hear about LR's performance when raw files from other vendors are converted to DNG...

November Red

Autumn scenery (Leitgeringer See) • Fuji S5pro, Nikon AF-S DX Nikkor 18-200VR, Polarizer

I usually stick to a white balance of about 5000K when I'm taking photos in order to get a unified "daylight film" look (I do apply minor adjustments of course).

But then again... I'm currently reading a book about nature photography (a german translation of a 1995 book from what must've been a series called "CameraWise", a quick Google search didn't reveal all that much). There's a section that describes how both an amateur and a pro photographer are approaching a scene, and the pro photographer is Mike Busselle, and most of the time he's stacking filters without mercy - polarizer, warming filter, ND-grad (actually, its quite entertaining to read that section).

Well, there's nothing like a polarizer. I used it for the photo here. It reduces "3rd party reflections", or so to say. It takes reflections not only from water surfaces and air, but also from leaves. Wonderful thing. Problem is that it costs light. I tried it - at its maximum effect its almost 3 stops. Whoah. That means a safe 1/200s exposure is a problematic 1/25s exposure with the polarizer (not that much of a problem with today VR/IS lenses, of course). Shooting landscapes with a polarizer is a good idea, but it implies using a tripod very often (which is a good idea anyway because it leaves a lot more space for composition).

Then there's the ND-grad filter. At first, its a great idea - you make the brighter parts of a photo darker, and in return, you can expose the darker parts longer. That results in a better exposure of the dark parts and better overall S/N ratio. I'm using the Cokin filter system, and the problem is quite obvious: it makes the colors in the brighter parts all wrong, giving them a warm brownish tint - and thats a little difficult to fix.

If a camera has enough dynamic range and you're shooting raw (which usually gives you one extra stop of headroom in the highlights - its insane to not utilize it IMHO), it is probably better to expose to the right as good as you can and create the ND-grad effect in software. Lightroom 2.x has a built in feature that does exactly that - much like Picasa's graduated tint, but with more options, naturally (never forget: Picasa is free, and LR is big bucks). And besides that, fiddling around with the adaptor rings, filter holders and the filters itself is just unnerving. As if getting a good exposure wasn't complicated enough already! :-)

And finally, there's the "warming filter". I dare say that, even if you're shooting "only JPEG", you don't need it in digital photography. First, we can adjust the white balance right in the camera (set it to "cloudy" or "shadows" and hey presto, you have your warming filter effect). Second, we can adjust the white balance on the computer (thats possible quite nicely even for JPEGs in Picasa, well, in a limited range - and if you're shooting raw everything's completely up to you, how cool is that? compared to film, I mean).

In the photo above, I've set the white balance to "cloudy" in Lightroom (looking back at that day, actually a quite fitting choice:-). The bigger problem is that a whole lot of displays are not calibrated. Photos are edited on displays that are set to an "office" white balance of 8500K or 9300K and come out completely wrong - and people don't even notice it unless they make prints...

Oh, and there's another filter that keeps popping up all the time: the UV filter. A UV filter is not needed in digital photography. Most of the time, it does no good. Why on earth would anyone want to add yet another (flat!) glass surface in front of the lens that decreases contrast, falsifies color rendition and increases the likeliness of ugly lens flares? Get rid of it. Don't believe the hype. I've been down this road. UV filters do no good to your photos. The can protect your front lens, all right - but unless you're a complete dork, the lens hood protects the front lens AND helps to reduce flare, so IMHO: forget it once and for all. Save the money and buy a good polarizer instead.

Precious Moments - Alpenglühen

November 2nd we went on a hiking trip from the Steinplatte (near Waidring in Tirol) to the Fellhorn - its a very comfortable tour with spectacular sights into both the central alps in Austria and the Chiemgau region in Germany.

I've recently read in a german blog that photography is being in the right place at the right time (and release the shutter:-) - and thats true especially for landscape photography.

During our descend to the parking area I made a short stop while the others went ahead (yes, I had to pee). When I turned around to return to the track, the setting sun bathed the nearby mountains in its last rays of warm, orange light. What a moment!



And just a moment it was, indeed. The fellow hikers already where in the woods below and did not see the amazing "glow on the rocks". Only 5 minutes later, it was all over, and light returned to its normal progress when its getting dark:



The mountain on the left of the photos is called the "Steinplatte" ("stone plate") and in the first shot above, in the back are the "Loferer Steinberge" as well.

Panning

I've read about this technique on the pages of Bjørn Rørslett first (his pages are a great resource for Nikon users because of his wonderful camera and especially lens reviews), I think it was on this page. Only later I found out that "traditional" panning means that you move the camera to follow an object in motion and use a slow shutter speed to blur the background while keeping the main subject in focus. :-)

I find panning an interesting technique (among others) to reduce an image to its colours and shapes, and actually, I found out that I have an "original" and a panned version of an image to illustrate the effect here. :-)

Normal photo:

Nikon D70s @ ISO200, 1/15s with AF-S DX VR Nikkor 18-200 @ 130mm, f/8

Panned version:

Nikon D70s @ ISO200, 1/20s with AF-S DX VR Nikkor 18-200 @ 130mm, f/8

Well, its not the same view and both images have been post processed to carve out their individual quality. Surprisingly, the normal version has an even longer exposure time which was possible only because of the lens' VR mechanism (Canon calls it "IS", other abbreviations of the same thing include "OS", "SR", and whatnot). In the second shot, I simply moved the camera up and down and released the shutter (it took a couple of tries until I got the image that I wanted, of course).

Observations

So, after one week of being featured in the Explore feature of Picasa Web Albums, things have returned to normal, comment-wise. :-) I did follow a lot of links back to people's albums and I want to share my observations and thoughts.

Some people have unbelievably large albums that they share - and it gives me the creeps. Sorry folks... I'm simply not willing to browse through 100+ photos of a single album labelled "Landscapes" - and then there's another 15 albums equally large. I've written about this before, I know, but its still simply tiresome to browse through such large albums of samey photos IMHO. I'm absolutely sure that restricting oneself to showing fewer photos almost automatically increases the perceived quality.

...and then there's this special thing called "taste". :-) I was quite surprised to get very positive comments on this photo:

I mean... yes, I took the photo, I published it because of the interesting mixture of blue and yellow tones, but other than that, I don't consider it very good. I should've used panning to blur the image, or deliberately shoot out of focus to reduce it to the colours and vague shapes... but nevertheless, the photo received comments such as "perfect, there's nothing more to add!" (translated from a german comment). This is an... humm... interesting experience.

And last not least, a lot of people seem to use Picasa Web Albums only to share their photos privately among friends. They have no public albums. Thats sad, IMHO. Following back some of the comments to the albums of the visitors I found some extremely good photos (one would be here for example), and thats a major part of the fun!

Featured on Explore!

Wooo-hooo! Last weekend one of my photos from the "The Rustling of Leaves" album (this used to be an Autumn themed album) was shown in the "Explore" feature of the Picasa Web Albums!

I received A LOT of very friendly and positive feedback, not only for the featured photo, but for a lot of my other photos, too. I'm happy to see that people had a look at my other public albums too, and I'm even happier of course that the visitors liked what they found.

So here's a big THANK YOU to all those who visited my album(s) and left a friendly comment. I still wish that the community features of Picasa Web Albums will be enhanced further (with a counter, a "rating" system for visitors, much like the rating stars feature in Google Groups, a way to contact other members privately, etc. etc.), and the "Explore" feature is the right way to go.

My usual practice is to follow the link back to the web album of a visitor that left a comment - but with so much feedback, I'll have a hard time to do that in time. The good thing is that the list of comments is preserved for quite a long time (I can follow my comments back to October 2007 at the moment). This leaves me enough time to peek around and explore albums during the coming long winter nights. :-)

The featured photo is the one below. It was taken on the same dull and grey day as the photo that I mentioned when I originally announced the album, and in this situation the auto ISO feature went up to ISO800 because using an even larger aperture opening would've meant a too shallow depth of field.

"Autumnfire"