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Author Topic: Tip of The Year  (Read 7339 times)

didger

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Tip of The Year
« Reply #20 on: December 14, 2004, 09:12:22 am »

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Tip Four: Using ND Grads with digital cameras is fun and it provides a slightly different look than digitally producing the effect. Plus, it takes less time.
Hmmm.  Because I've seen a lot of folks taking a LOT of time fussing with ND grads in the field I posted on another thread that less time is an advantage of bracketing and blending and someone responded that it doesn't need to take so much time.  Well, neither does bracketing and blending.  The shooting part takes just seconds; it certainly takes me no more time to shoot the two shots than it takes to take out a filter, put in in place and do the shot.  The Photoshop part takes literally only a few seconds (much less than a minute) with 1ds images; much less time with smaller images.  I've done hundreds of blends and it just isn't any sort of hassle whatsoever with the blending action that I've posted several times before.  One mouse click and a few seconds of processing time.  I've found this blending method (the layer mask technique in Michael's tutorial) quite bomb proof as long as your images are properly registered.

So, that's my tip.  Try bracketing and blending some time if you haven't so far.  It's fun and easy and very versatile, since the light/dark division of the scene can be unlimitedly complex (like typical narrow canyon scenes) and super fast (though tripod is required).  If I ever encounter enough situations where there's problems with that, I'll start carrying ND grad filters, but I won't carry anything extra on strenuous backpacking trips just as an alternative and for "fun".
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61Dynamic

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Tip of The Year
« Reply #21 on: December 14, 2004, 02:13:47 pm »

1. Workflow starts from the point you meter the light in a scene and ends with a print in your (or your customer's) hand.

2. Meter with a good light meter, check the histo. and shoot with Manual exposure.

2b. Auto exposure of any sort ain't worth jack and only adds time latter on in post trying to correct for the cameras idea of good exposure.

3. Automatic flashes automatically suck. Buy a manually controlable flash and learn how to use it.

4. The 10D is only marginally better than a hacked 300D and the 300D handles RAW files slightly faster than the 10D.

6. The 10D will sometimes spend a good 30 sec blinking its "activity" light when a CF card fills. Leave two to three shots worth of free space on the card to avoid that (learned this in the middle of a wedding ceremony-ouch).

7. Different cameras with different lenses may need different WB settings set in post. Handle WB in the field (and in post) seperatly for each camera.

8. If you are making the switch from film to digital, don't dive head-first into it in the middle fo your busy season. Make the switch when you have time to learn digital. Esp. if you are computer illiterate...

9. A camera strap that does not twist up is worth every cent of the $10 or so you pay for it.

10. Proper WB is important, even if you only plan on converting to BW latter. As nniko pointed out, WB has an effect on toneality (as do the calibration sliders).

11. "always turn on every possible light there is in a given room " ...and you'll always have to turn them back on when the stubborn people you're shooting keep turning the lights off agian!

12. The Universal PDA case from Palm makes a great portable Hard-drive Unit holder. Get the one with a SD card holder for a place to hold buisness cards (they both have a pouch of sorts on tyhe back where the belt-loop is, but cards tend to scratch agianst you sides).
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gryffyn

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Tip of The Year
« Reply #22 on: December 14, 2004, 04:34:13 pm »

...and the equipment don't matter much.  The number of megapixels in your critical eye and grey matter are much more important than the size of your sensor or the quality of your lenses.
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Ray

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Tip of The Year
« Reply #23 on: December 15, 2004, 10:45:36 pm »

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Actually, the good stitching programs do *lots more* than just line up the pixels, such as you might do with Photoshop. I'm not familiar with Image Assembler, but I suspect it's similar to PTMac. (Although PTMac doesn't have that file size limitation.)
I think you're absolutely right there, Jim   . However, ImageAssembler, I suspect, is a lot easier to use than Panorama Tools, and a lot faster. On the downside, I get the impression it's not as flexible as Pano Tools because many of the functions are automatic, and the program often gets it wrong. (Such as automatic lens focal length and tilt calculations).

For this reason, I use the 'no frills' image stitch option where the choices are just vertical and/or horizontal alignment, flags or no flags (automatic placing of flags) and force row (or column) of images into straight line etc.

I've given up on the time consuming, frustrating task of trying to compensate for serious parallax errors, which I'm sure Pano Tools is better at doing. (But not quickly and easily).

I only attempt to stitch images that are relatively free of such errors, such as distant scenes with nothing closer than about 200 metres (using my 100-400 zoom), or closer scenes with the Canon TS-E lenses. When the images are right, I can load and stitch a dozen images in about 5-10 minutes using IA, and 3 or 4 TS-E images in about 2 minutes.

I recently tested my TSE 90mm with 1.4x extender in my studio. I placed the tripod about 6 metres from the end of the room and (camera vertical) photographed a row and a half of books and vertically stacked LP albums close to the ceiling where there is a sloping exposed beam. This mixture of vertical, horizontal and diagonal straight lines, and fine print, seemed an ideal test of the stitching capabilities of ImageAssembler with a good source.

The entire stitching process, from loading the source images to saving the final result, took 2 or 3 minutes (automatic positioning of flags). The results looked perfect. All the lines were straight and there were no 'seams' in the sense of no abrupt changes in toality.

However, when one starts pixel-peeping, things are not quite what they seem to be. Sure enough, at 100% magnification on the screen there were two LP albums, slap in the middle of an overlap, that exhibited blurred labelling. The lettering had a shadow. So I used my technique (tip of the year) to get rid of this. I cropped the images so the offending LP album appeared only once in the overlap area.

Did this produce a perfect stitch? Not quite. I'd transferred the blurring to a vertical timber division in the bookcase. Only I would notice it because I'm familiar with the precise grain on that piece of timber  .

ps. I had another go at that project because any stitching program worth its salt should be able to produce a perfect stitch with TS-E images, considering the very small parallax errors and lens flaws. This time I used IA's 'lens wizard' to create a lens profile and then stitched the 4 cropped images using that profile. Result? A perfect stitch.
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BJL

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Tip of The Year
« Reply #24 on: December 14, 2004, 03:27:20 pm »

How about this: when considering the change from film SLR to digital, make your first digital camera an affordable middle of the line compact digicam (say 3MP or 4MP, though mine was only 2MP), while keeping the film camera.

This showed me some of my relative priorities and preferences on things like pixel counts, sensor ISO speeds, viewfinder optoins and performance, shutter lag, and ergonomic features like how manual settings are controlled. Thus I was a far better informed customer when I laid down the big bucks for a DSLR than if I had relied on what I read online and in camera magazines, and it also left me with a convenient little snapshot camera.
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Ray

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Tip of The Year
« Reply #25 on: December 14, 2004, 08:08:31 pm »

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...and the equipment don't matter much.  The number of megapixels in your critical eye and grey matter are much more important than the size of your sensor or the quality of your lenses.
Hey! Why bother with photography at all? If you have so much confidence in the megapixels in your critical eye and grey matter, why not take up painting?  :D
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didger

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Tip of The Year
« Reply #26 on: December 13, 2004, 12:07:10 pm »

Deletion due to conflict between public and PM response.  

A "nicer" tip?
Live and let live.  To each his own.  De Gustibus non Disputandum.

A practical backpacking photography tip:
For best results make the photography the priority, rather than something you do while on a trip with a pre-programmed 10-15 miles of hiking per day.  Hike less, be mentally still more, get in tune, keep your eyes wide open more and learn what there is in one small area at various times of the day over a period of at least several days.
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Lisa Nikodym

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Tip of The Year
« Reply #27 on: December 13, 2004, 01:25:48 pm »

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All ga gotta do is just go out practically every day and work all the light hours of the day for months on end, years on end.

Wish I could, but I've got a non-photographic career with limited vacation time.  But without that career, I couldn't afford the travel.  And I think if I were to try to make photography a paying career, I'd rapidly get sick of it.  So, I make do with the time I have for it.

Lisa
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Madness

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Tip of The Year
« Reply #28 on: December 13, 2004, 03:01:49 pm »

always turn on every possible light there is in a given room
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Jonathan Wienke

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Tip of The Year
« Reply #29 on: December 13, 2004, 04:55:29 pm »

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A photoshop one:

Channels = selections = masks = alpha channels = 8 bit images
With Photoshop CS, none of the things you mention require 8-bit mode. It's one of the best reasons to upgrade if you haven't. That and the shadow/highlight tool and the updated Camera RAW.
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AJSJones

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Tip of The Year
« Reply #30 on: December 13, 2004, 08:53:01 pm »

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My favorite tip:  Using the TSE lenses shifted one direction in combination with the camera shifted the opposite direction to generate three images that can be then be stitched into a PERFECTLY SEAMLESS image.  
Ray,
What Jack is describing is intended to keep the lens position stationary and effectively "shift" the camera and sensor across the fixed image it projects in three steps.  This eliminates the possibility of parallax making the stitching of the foreground a problem.  (Some LF cameras allow you to move the film carrier like that.)
  On the 20D you do only need two exposures with the ~ 7% overlap.  You can also move the camera as Jack suggests but for the horizon (for example) you still only need the two shots, but the image of the blade of grass an inch from the lens doesn't move (the way it would if you moved the lens position).

Andy
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GordonMcGregor

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Tip of The Year
« Reply #31 on: December 13, 2004, 08:48:32 pm »

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As another aside, I find the shadow/highlight tool almost unusable for any decent starting exposure.  You can pull a whole lot of image data around using it, but the results seldom seem worth looking at afterwards.
Would that include this image?

Or this one?
I have no idea given all you are showing are end results.  Are you saying the only way you could get a decent image was because of magic achieved through the shadow/ highlight tool ?  This is probably more usefully a discussion for another thread.  As I said earlier, I'd certainly agree with you that there are plenty of good reasons to upgrade to Photoshop CS, none of which have really changed the value of the insight I had a year ago, which was the original point.
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BernardLanguillier

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Tip of The Year
« Reply #32 on: December 14, 2004, 12:02:05 am »

Best tip of the year? Get a 4*5 camera!...

Cheers,
Bernard

Jack Flesher

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Tip of The Year
« Reply #33 on: December 14, 2004, 10:17:44 am »

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The advantage of three images, is the center image involves the center sweet-spot of the lens and IMO make the overall image better.

.....these resulting three images will line up PERFECTLY in PS on layers, and you can easily mask out the joints.  Moreover, any close or far objects also line up perfectly.  I practiced this procedure on a group of telephone poles with lots of wires.  Works like a champ  

Jack
Okay! Got it. Thanks. I guess I didn't follow this because I rarely have trouble stitching TS-E images. When I do, because of grass and the like in the very near foreground which can get slightly out of register in the overlap area, producing a noticeable double image effect, I've always been able to fix it by cropping off unnecessary overlap.

A great feature of Panavue's Image Assembler is its capacity to stitch different sized images as wll as images with a very narrow overlap. The aprox. 7% overlap of 2 horizontal images that Andy mentions is never a problem as long as there's detail there for the flags. The 3 vertical images (or horizontal images stitched vertically) with a substantial overlap are the ones that occasionally give trouble, but only before cropping. That's my tip   .

However, I'll check out the idea of making the central horizontal image the main one, which with Image Assembler would involve tacking on a half image on each side of the central image, with minimum overlap.
Ray:

FTR, YOU can do a perfect job of assembling the images in PS -- better than any phot-assembler program, and once you get the hang of it it takes only a few minutes.
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Ray

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Tip of The Year
« Reply #34 on: December 14, 2004, 07:59:03 pm »

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YOU can do a perfect job of assembling the images in PS -- better than any phot-assembler program, and once you get the hang of it it takes only a few minutes.
Jack,
I've been using Image Assembler for years, before Canon rolled out the D30. This program is just so fast and easy with non-problem images. Anything you can stitch perfectly in PS, I'll stitch in half the time in IA. (I'm guessing, of course  )

Nevertheless, I do need to practise assembling images in PS because IA has a resulting file size limitations of around 400MB. It would be a nightmare stitching 60x20D images in PS individually. But merging 3 or 4 groups, prestitched in IA, should be easily manageable.
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