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DP Merrill B&W workflow-SPP/Iridient Developer.

PaulO

New member
I really liking the way the DP Merrils do B&W. My current workflow is to set the camera on B&W which causes SPP to open with Monochrome, though you can still switch to color mode in SPP. It appears that setting the camera to B&W only affects the LCD display and the default setting in SPP.
When processing in SPP I set the exposure to eliminate any burned out highlights (occasional adding a little fill light). I also set sharpness to -1.5 as it looks like SPP still does some sharpening at the 0 setting. I also tend to set the color wheel to more blue, though this depends on the tones in the image. Then save as 16 bit TIFF and into PS for further processing.
With the above workflow, PS no longer has the color information available and I sometimes I prefer to leave it with the color information in SPP and use the 8 color channel controlls in ACR (HSL) as this gives me more control of the tones of various colors are increased/decreased.

How does this compare to what others are using?

I’ve gotten tired of SPP crashing (MBPr) every 2nd or 3rd time I edit an image. So, I recently bought Iridient Developer (Mac only) which seems to provide a lot more control and I’ve never crashed it. I still have to output to PS as Iridient does not do any local editing (cropping, spotting, dodge/burn…).
There is a menu for Mono. It has a channel mixer, but only for 3 colors, unlike the 8 that you have in PS/ACR in HSL when converted to grayscale. In the ‘In’ tab, there is also an option to select the input profile “Embedded Sigma XDR Monochrome”, which seems to give you the default starting point for BW similar to selecting Monochrome in the SPP menu.
I've Googled for workflow information for BW for Iridient but not found much.

Has anyone experimented with Iridient Developer for B&W images? I'd be interested in your workflow.

Thanks!
 

Kofronj

New member
Hi Paul,

First off, I went and checked your website. It took a while to get my jaw back in place---really nice stuff!!!

I've never loved Irident Developer. On the other hand, SPP has not been a crash-prone package for me. If you're interested in seeing if you could 'fix' SPP, I'd ask what version you're using, and what OS is on your Mac. I run mine on a iMac and it's pretty stable (5.x on Mac 10.8).

Cheers,

Jim
 

PaulO

New member
Hi Jim,

Thanks for the kind words.
As for my platform: I’m running OS X 10.9.4 (Mavericks) on a MacBook Pro with 15” retina screen, 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 (Late 2012 purchase). I have 8 GB solid state memory. I’m running SPP 5.5.3. I should note that I'm a small volume shooter and even though it crashes I tend to only process a dozen images a week with most of the editing being done in PS.
 

foveon

Member
In my experience SPP easily runs into RAM problems, so I created a new folder. named it "sigtemp" and copy the RAWs I want to open in SPP one by one into this folder, just one at a time. I open the file in SPP from this folder and for me SPP works much quicker and more stable operated that way.
Give it a try.
 

Tim

Active member
Hi Paul, I had a look through your website. I am curious as to which of the Merrills you use?
 

PaulO

New member
I have a DP2M and a DP3M. For wider angle-of-view images, I'll use the DP2M for panos as most of my images are static subjects. Most of the images on my website were taken with a Pentax 67 (film) or a Canon 5DII.
 
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