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RAW conversion and pp techniques

Will

New member
For me it's been a very interesting aspect of this forum to see the different styles people achieve with their RAW conversions and PP. I'm particularly intrigued with the black and white images produced here, where, aside from other variations, they seem to fall into those that somehow look like semi gloss or silk prints (I would include the excellent work of Mitch in this category) and those that look as though printed on matt (mine for example). Bearing in mind that I'm viewing these on the same computer screen of course. Is this just my imagination or do other people see this effect?
 

Will

New member
I wondered if it might be interesting to get someone to volunteer a RAW file and see what different people can do with it. Nothing radicle, just using their usual workflow to see what comes out.
 

sizifo

New member
Because I'm not as good a photographer as 99% of people here, I'm quite interested in this kind of exercise. So, I'm just uploading the 5 dngs for the photos below to http://homepage.mac.com/WebObjects/...d33&fpath=getdpi&templatefn=FileSharing1.html
The attachments represent the current state in my pp. I uploaded the first one already a few weeks ago with the same idea.

However, attaching the photos to the post messes up the quality to a significant degree for some reason. They still more or less represent how I want them to look, but any ideas on how to improve this?
 
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Will

New member
Maybe we could pick one of them to each try our own method on. I'm in no way an expert in this but I'm willing to expose myself as the amateur amongst us if other more experienced people will give it a try as well. The composition is not what I'm after here, just the conversion from RAW and pp refinement. Composition could perhaps be looked at another time.
 

Cindy Flood

Super Moderator
If one photo is picked, I will give it a try. That has been done on another forum I read and is fun and maybe we can all learn something. Count me in!
 

ShiroKuro

New member
I am in the 1% you spoke of :) Here is my attempt at one of your photos ... Hope you do not mind to much....
 
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sizifo

New member
Thanks ShiroKuro. That looks great. How did you do it?

Perhaps we could pick the church photo then?
 

Will

New member
I want to make clear that I don't see this as a thread to claim one method produces better results then another, it isn't meant as a competition. I'm merely interested in how people achieve their results so that we, less experienced people, can gain insight.

OK, I had already chosen this one at random but I will have a go at the church later today.

For this one I used CS2 and set the options like this before saving ass a jpg.
temperature 8000, tint +49, exposure +.75, shadow 0, brightness 50, contrast -39, saturation +10
I then used channel mixer to covert to B&W 30 40 30
Shadow highlight with shadow 7% highlight 28%
Levels 10 0.69 173
Brightness -5 contrast +10
Unsharp mask 80% radius 2 threshold 6

I then saved the psd file as a jpg and uploaded.

I think I could have kept more cloud detail if I had taken more time but work beckons.

 

sizifo

New member
Great.

I've also set up my idisk to allow uploads at http://idisk.mac.com/vid33-Public?view=web. If you want you can now upload the full sized jpgs (or tiffs, or whatever). Think the upload only works at the top level directory, but I can later place them alongside the dngs for everybody to download.

The forum attachments are good for getting the general idea, but the full sized images would be much more useful. Specifically, then you can try and mimic what you like about the other person's look in your application of choice.
 
M

Mitch Alland

Guest
For me it's been a very interesting aspect of this forum to see the different styles people achieve with their RAW conversions and PP. I'm particularly intrigued with the black and white images produced here, where, aside from other variations, they seem to fall into those that somehow look like semi gloss or silk prints (I would include the excellent work of Mitch in this category) and those that look as though printed on matt (mine for example). Bearing in mind that I'm viewing these on the same computer screen of course. Is this just my imagination or do other people see this effect?
Will,

Thanks for the kind words; but I don't think that you can infer from the images that you're seeing how they might be printed in terms of a matte of glossy surface: they merely vary in gradation, that is, the nature of the tonal transitions, and in contrast. I tend to like more contrast and a shorter range of mid-tones than most people, but I tend to vary this depending on the expressive intent of the particular print. For example, clearly there is a difference in approach between the first and the second picture:







The other thing to keep in mind is that, for B&W in particular, you can make prints more expressive if you do selective burning and dodging — much more so than in colour, which can quickly become wildly unrealistic with this approach. The best introduction, short of a darkroom printing workshop, is to look at the following book of darkroom tecnhiques, which will quickly give you a sense of how to produce expressive prints by digital burning and dodging — the book contains many example of how a "straight" print is transformed into an expressive one and shows the steps taken to achieve this in each case:

http://www.amazon.com/Larry-Bartlet...r_1_10?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203422240&sr=8-10

—Mitch/Huahin
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/
 

Will

New member
Mitch,

Thanks for your response, and thank you for posting two examples which show so well what I was talking about. My matt verses gloss was alluding to the impression I get when viewing the images rather than an assumption about how they would be printed. If you look at the newspaper readers skin tones there is a shiny texture to them which is quite different to the smoother textures of the other image. Your explanation of the the different treatment of the two images which achieves this is exactly the sort of insight I was hoping for when starting this thread.
Thanks also for the link, I will have a look later. In the mean time I hope that a few more people will take up the challenge to interpret the dng files that sizifo kindly provided. How much the original file matters, or effects the final interpretation would be useful to know.

I realise this thread should possibly have been in a different section of the forum but since it is dealing with small sensor image files perhaps it can stay here for now?
 

Maggie O

Active member
OK, here's a quick take in LightZone (gotta take my BF to the airport, I can explain what I did later):
 
W

wbrandsma

Guest
I took this one in Lightzone and applied 9 ZoneMappers with selective regions to adjust the contrast locally. Three for the sky, three for the water, and three for the buildings. One ZoneMapper was just for an overal contrast adjustment. After that I applied some extra sharpening.

This is a great way to share different techniques.
 

Will

New member
So you don't like mine Maggie :(

;)

Seriously though I don't think it is a matter of who wins, but that we all win if we learn something from each other.
 

sizifo

New member
I've learnt one thing very quickly, and that's that Aperture is not useful for everything. It seems impossible to get the same contrast in the clouds as in your versions without messing up the rest of the photo, though I'll keep trying. It's probably time to try a program with selection tools.

I agree that Wouter's version looks best so far - but I like the others as well. Shirokuro, just checked out your Hawaii photos, and think they are some of the best I've seen on this forum. Can you reveal a bit about the methods??

Maggie, are you intentionally pulling the shadows up until they are grainy? It's an interesting idea, I think, to make a part of the photo more grainy than the rest. I've tried it in the attached photo - the poster says "I've never been to New York". (It's near the main building of the old hamburg port, which can be seen on the lhs.)

Hamburg is a very photogenic city, BTW, the light can be stunning - when it's not raining.

Again, it's a little difficult to get the full picture (no pun intended) from the small attachments, so if anybody wants to upload the full sized versions, you can use http://idisk.mac.com/vid33-Public?view=web.
 
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