Live View - I finally worked it out!

[Neil Hunt]

About 3 months ago I bought a camera with Live View. Couldn't see the point to start with really, then last week it dawned on me that for folk brought up on MF and LF, its actually just like composing your picture on the ground glass. Fantastic, now I'm hooked.

Obviously for purists, its not upside down or back to front yet, but these new ones with articulating screens should soon fix that! On the other hand never needed to resort to the Gaussian Blur filter with 5x4.

[Neil Hunt]

Sorry forgot to add a picture!

[Wayne Fox]

About 3 months ago I bought a camera with Live View. Couldn't see the point to start with really, then last week it dawned on me that for folk brought up on MF and LF, its actually just like composing your picture on the ground glass. Fantastic, now I'm hooked.

Obviously for purists, its not upside down or back to front yet, but these new ones with articulating screens should soon fix that! On the other hand never needed to resort to the Gaussian Blur filter with 5x4.
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For me the best part is using 10x zoom to manually focus while in live view ... it's always sharper than letting autofocus do it, or trying to manually focus through the viewfinder.  Almost like using a loupe on the ground glass of a view camera.

[daethon]

Sorry forgot to add a picture!
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Love the effect.  How exactly did you do that?  I'm assuming that you did that at exposure, its awesome, I'd love to understand the process

[Neil Hunt]

For me the best part is using 10x zoom to manually focus while in live view ... it's always sharper than letting autofocus do it, or trying to manually focus through the viewfinder.  Almost like using a loupe on the ground glass of a view camera.
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Love the effect.  How exactly did you do that?  I'm assuming that you did that at exposure, its awesome, I'd love to understand the process
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Wayne, I think its probably my eyes, or maybe that Olympus isn't the best implementation, but the autofocus tends to do better than me usually.

Daethon, its actually really easy. Its just a combination of two techniques. In the case of this one, I restricted the tonal range a bit by knocking down the highlights to about 245 using the output slider then clip the shadow end bit, personal preference is then to move the midpoint so maybe 75% of the image is below it, then apply a local contrast enhancement (30% at 100px in this case). After that on a duplicate layer apply a gaussian blur, just 15 but this is according to taste (a 50MB file I'd use 25) then start rubbing out the bits you don't need with the eraser tool. I tend to just emphasise the areas that were supposed to be the focal point of the original image, but sometimes put in a pretend plane of focus.

[Wayne Fox]

Wayne, I think its probably my eyes, or maybe that Olympus isn't the best implementation, but the autofocus tends to do better than me usually.


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Could be the camera.  On the Canon, a quick couple of clicks and you're at 10x magnification. Very easy to manually focus.  Of course, I"m guessing it will get harder, as I find myself using reading glasses more often these days, but seldom have them when I'm shooting.