which camera?

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Neil,

RAW is also a better source for serious retouching and restoration work.

Depending on the level of compression, JPEG images can be very difficult to work with … Photoshop 'Airbrush' work shows up horribly on any JPEG where the blocking-effect of the compression is detectable.

Which is, of course, totally irrelevant if you don't do that sort of thing.

MichaelG.

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Duplicate post deleted

[typing on the 'bus]

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 16/06/2016 17:00:28

[Geoff TheasbyParticipant @geofftheasby]

Like Neil, and others, I used to have an SLR & lenses (Pentax Spotmatic) but went for a compact digital after discussing it with David Clark, for publication as required in Club News. I now use a Lumix FS35 which gives photos about 6MB in jpeg. it has a good zoom, and is ideal for when I want a picture without setting up the camera at length in exhibitions, club open days etc. I also have a Fuji X-20 which has a moderate zoom, but everything is fully adjustable every which way, and is the one I use for experimenting with. It has an Automatic setting, which was NOT selected when I needed a quick, unrepeatable 'snapshot', the other day, and I lost the picture, due to severe overexposure. Mea Maxima Culpa, I know!

Geoff

[Martin WParticipant @martinw]

Timothy

I agree with you that some types of print will suffer from colour fading but Canon suggest that their ChromaLife 100+ inks on their paper will last 100 years!! However when you read the small print there seem to be fairly demanding conditions required to achieve this. Having turned 70 I don't think I'm in a position to challenge them .

Martin

[NJHParticipant @njh]

Roger & Timothy

I'm sorry if I have offended you with my comments about RAW – it was certainly not my intention and "condescending" is certainly not my style ( well I guess I must say not my INTENDED style as you read it as such!)

I have spent many years with photography and have finally (?) settled into a routine that suits me. I find (nearly?) every image I take requires some work and, as my camera supplies a RAW file, I prefer to work with that ( why throw away information?). My processing (and storage) is largely in Adobe Lightroom which handles RAW or jPEG seamlessly. I make the occasional diversion into Photoshop – I have a philosophy of removing unwanted bits but, generally, not adding things that weren't there – but return to Lr for output.

I have an A3+ colour printer (with 9 inks!) – and yes I need paper profiles for each paper type that I use ( about 6 at the last count) !

My photography is only for my own satisfaction and, occasionally, dis-satisfaction following the slings and arrows of outrageous Photography judges. Just think bad tempered Traffic Warden on a bad day! ( I apologise in advance to any Traffic Wardens who might read this – I'm just joking I think you are wonderful and do a great job).

Norman

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Posted by Michael Gilligan on 16/06/2016 16:58:46:

Depending on the level of compression,

TBH if you keep the quality setting high, I don't think this is a real problem, but I agree that over-compression causes awful artefacts.

I think the real issue is that JPEGs are only 8-bit per channel while RAW from my 10D is12 bit and the 450D is 14 bit, a huge increase in headroom if you want to stretch an image or explore shadows.

Neil

[Howard LewisParticipant @howardlewis46836]

Am rather ashamed to say that my Canon F1ns now languish unused , in favour of a, now elderly, Panasonic FZ50 Bridge camera, with a 10X Leitz Vario Elmarit lens (The reason for choosing it). This has a 10Mb capability, but has always been used in the first stage of JPEG compression, to give 8.5Mb capacity. The resulting files of about 4Mb allow a print larger than A4 to be produced, if required. (Never, so far. Even A4s from cropped images seem to be of acceptable quality). My brother in law complained that I was sending him files large enough for him to paper his walls!

For publication, I resize the files to circa 500Mb, which seems to have been acceptable, so far.

Not having any image modifying programs, only straight prints are produced. The way in which the camera, now outdated, can deal so well with difficult lighting situations, is amazing. If I need more light than the in built flash can provide, I attach my even older Metz CT45 via a safety adaptor.

But it depends on what you want to do; horse for courses, and so on. But don't spend money on features that you will never use, such as video and sound, or mega shots per second burst. A Ferrari is not the ideal car for local shopping trips! In my view, for recording model engineering products and processes, SLR type viewing is necessary, but others may well find a compact camera meets their needs.

For the ultimate in quality, and adaptability, but not portability or speed of use, use reversal film in a 10 x 8 camera. (But not if you want to do photomicography!) This will allow you to produce images good enough to go on billboards; but unless cost is unimportant, think carefully before releasing the shutter!

Howard

[Roger Williams 2Participant @rogerwilliams2]

NJH , you certainly havent offended me in the slightest , in fact I enjoy these friendly discussions !. Long may they continue. Regards to all.

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

When sending images for MEW images of ~500kb can be fine for the smaller images used inside the magazine, but this does depend on the number of pixels in the image.

Howard, sorry to pick on you, but some of yours do show noticeable 'jpegging' when zoomed in as they are big images (5000 x3000 pixels) but this just means we can't crop them too tightly. I would suggest down-sampling by 50% then compressing to about 1MB for better results.

Another author sent me several pics from 450kB down to 120kB – but all very sharp as they were not large pixel-wise. the smallest was about 1200 x 900 pixels, which is fine as we print at 300 dpi and a 4×3 images is much larger than a typical in-article shot. Normally in I would want bigger, but this contributor knows how we are likely to use each shot.

Contributors should make sure they keep their originals, because if I want an image as a cover shot or to use it very large, I will get in touch. Don't crop if you can avoid it, as we need the freedom to crop to fit the page layout.

For guidance, our cover shots are usually 8" x 8" so hat's 2400 x 2400 pixels – less than six megabytes, but of course that doesn't leave us any cropping space (and we have a tradition of chopping off the top of people's heads. Why? – because we can!).

That said, once or twice our retouchers have worked real magic and made tiny pictures into a passable cover shot. I have a few tricks up my sleeve as well

Neil

[ZebethyalParticipant @zebethyal]

@NJH – I also appologise if I went too far in my accusations, I guess I can be a little sensitive to perceived 'JPG bashing'.

@Martin W – I guess it depends on what you are willing to invest in printer/paper wise. Despite having an Epson photo quality printer with 6 inks, I can see at least 50% fade in some of the prints I produced on it a few years ago. I have since ditched the inkjet in favour of an HP colour laser and have any prints I may require printed at Costco for pennies. I was fed up with forever having to clean the printhead multiple times on the inkjet every time I needed to use it after a week or more of inactivity.

For web use, I save images at a maximum edge length of 800 pixels and a maximum image size of less than 200Kb, (I have an 'action' in Photoshop to do this for me that I can use to 'batch' process if required) this means they should fit on pretty much any monitor inside a browser window without the need to pan around the image, display at good enough quality for the web page and they should download fast on pretty much any speed of broadband connection.

If I want to upload full size, pretty much uncompressed JPGs, I will stick these on Alamy, SmugMug or Flickr, where I know the people likely to be viewing them are comfortable with large files and the associated download times.

[AjohnwParticipant @ajohnw51620]

There are two forms of compression in jpg's. In my view it's worth realising what they are.

One is the quality level they are saved at. These days on dlsr's at least the jpg fine setting is pretty high quality. If the camera and lens is up to it they will look ok even full sized on a PC screen. If they are enlarged further pixels will show but they will follow detail. Things are generally better than they were on compacts as well. They hadn't used to be. Detail would start getting blurred well before they were being viewed full sized. Some of the improvement is down to software in the camera but compacts with small sensors and high pixel counts do have limitations purely down to the physics of lenses. That limit is probably circa 6 mega pixels on a 1/2 inch sensor and many cameras use smaller sensors than that. Thanks to vidicon tubes a sensor has a diagonal of roughly 2/3 of the stated size.

The other compression is due to the bit depth that the sensor can record. This is usually 10, 12 or 14 bits which means for instance 2^ 10 light level steps. I don't know of any compact that uses over 2^10 steps. Jpg's are 2^8 and all cameras take there sensor bit depth and map it into the jpg's they produce, another form of compression. It's just like reading the values off a graph with a curve on it usually mostly compressing the dark end with less at the bright end. Some cameras offer different curves. High key, low key and what ever they dream up.

2^10, 1024 steps sounds great but in terms of how we see it represents circa 10 equal steps in light level. Way way under the capabilities of our eyes. 14 bit on some dslr's is as well.

When people work from raw they are applying these curves themselves. The advantage is that they can manipulate the fractional bits into the jpg they are producing where as when working on a jpg there aren't any only the 256 steps are there. I find that is often adequate. If not I use the raw file or if I can shoot 2 shots, one for low lights and another for the high lights. Some cameras will do this automatically but often generate an HDR looks as as it's fashionable. Results can look completely natural. It's also possible with decent cameras to produce 2 exposures from a single raw file and then merge them. I often find this quicker and easier than just working on the raw file in the normal way.

John

–

[Roger Provins 2Participant @rogerprovins2]

Many years ago I used to shoot mostly on 35mm transparency film (slides) and prints made from those using Ilfochrome (cibachrome) are still unfaded and like new, even those that were framed and are hanging on walls.

[Howard LewisParticipant @howardlewis46836]

Neil,

No offence taken, and Thanks for the advice re file sizes. 500Mb was the size suggested by another publication, but will not resize so violently in future.

Howard

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Posted by Howard Lewis on 18/06/2016 22:57:37:

Neil,

No offence taken, and Thanks for the advice re file sizes. 500Mb was the size suggested by another publication,

.

Howard and Neil

Sorry to be a swot … But it is important, and frequently 'got wrong' both in relation to file sizes and transmission speeds:

K stands for Kilo

M stands for Mega

b stands for bit

B stands for Byte

.

The use of upper or lower case is non-trivial.

[soap-box moment over]

MichaelG.

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by Michael Gilligan on 18/06/2016 23:37:18:

Posted by Howard Lewis on 18/06/2016 22:57:37:

Neil,

No offence taken, and Thanks for the advice re file sizes. 500Mb was the size suggested by another publication,

.

Howard and Neil

Sorry to be a swot … But it is important, and frequently 'got wrong' both in relation to file sizes and transmission speeds:

K stands for Kilo

M stands for Mega

b stands for bit

B stands for Byte

.

The use of upper or lower case is non-trivial.

[soap-box moment over]

MichaelG.

Huge apologies for being a super-swot, but isn't it lower case k for kilo?

Cheers,

Dave

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Posted by SillyOldDuffer on 19/06/2016 16:08:41:

K stands for Kilo

Huge apologies for being a super-swot, but isn't it lower case k for kilo?

Cheers,

Dave

.

Dave,

You are, of course, correct … and I hang my head in shame

My feeble excuse is that this new iPad automatically starts a new line with a capital letter … and I failed to correct that one.

MichaelG.

[AjohnwParticipant @ajohnw51620]

In some areas I suspect that little b for bit has fooled the punters as they may assume it means bytes. I mean there is only a factor 8 difference so people wont notice. On the other hand it might just be that serial comms are usually spec'd in bits per sec.

John

–

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Hmm…still waiting for that Warco Pedant Switch to arrive

Now are we talking kilobytes or kibibytes?

Neil

Edited By Neil Wyatt on 19/06/2016 17:57:37

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Posted by Ajohnw on 19/06/2016 17:09:52:

… I mean there is only a factor 8 difference so people wont notice. On the other hand it might just be that serial comms are usually spec'd in bits per sec.

.

I fondly remember when one of our suppliers produced a formal proposal offering a data 'pipe' of 40MB per second, complete with penalty clauses for any failure to perform … I did the decent thing and told him to correct it to 40Mb per second, but it was tempting to just accept it.

MichaelG.

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by Neil Wyatt on 19/06/2016 17:55:57:

Hmm…still waiting for that Warco Pedant Switch to arrive

Now are we talking kilobytes or kibibytes?

Neil

Edited By Neil Wyatt on 19/06/2016 17:57:37

You can't trust any of those modern Pedant Switches to do a good job. My 1928 Mark VII Boring Pedant insists we talk octets, preferably in Latin.

[John Stevenson 1Participant @johnstevenson1]

Posted by Neil Wyatt on 16/06/2016 22:32:10:

(and we have a tradition of chopping off the top of people's heads. Why? – because we can!).

Neil

Bastard…………………………………………

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Posted by John Stevenson on 19/06/2016 20:08:35:

Posted by Neil Wyatt on 16/06/2016 22:32:10:

(and we have a tradition of chopping off the top of people's heads. Why? – because we can!).

Neil

Bastard…………………………………………

It'll grow back… if you're lucky

Neil

[ZebethyalParticipant @zebethyal]

You then have the other marketing gimmic of hard disk/memory card sizes where 1MB quoted does not equal 1MB useable.

Hard disks, etc, are sold as 1000 units per kB, MB or GB, whereas the systems that use them use 1024 (2^10) units per kB, MB or GB, as such your 400GB hard drive only actually has 372.5GB of space before adding any file systems.

The reason for this? bigger numbers sound better from a sales point of view – just like the 8MP vs 4MP farce I mentioned earlier in this thread.

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Back on topic, pleased with this from my bridge camera last night – poor lighting and a flat battery, so warm it in my hands, put in camera and point and shoot within 3 or 4 seconds before the camera realises its flat and closes down!

[Author]

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