Does Canon make great kit, or what?

[Roger_Cavanagh]

It's been a rather dull and dreary day here in SE England with a drizzle persisting most of the afternoon. I was at at my desk and I noticed about 20:00 that there was a bit of blue sky and light. So I grabbed by D30 with the 70-200 LIS and snuck into my back garden hoping to catch the family of foxes that live somewhere round the bottom end.

They weren't there, so I just grabbed a few shots of some plants instead. The settings were ISO200 and shutter priority:

http://www.rogercavanagh.com/images/temp/CRW_2417L.jpg

http://www.rogercavanagh.com/images/temp/CRW_2419L.jpg

http://www.rogercavanagh.com/images/temp/CRW_2422L.jpg

http://www.rogercavanagh.com/images/temp/CRW_2432L.jpg

All four were taken at 1/60; aperture worked out to be either 2.8 or 3.5. None of the shots are anything special except that I took them ( :D - see this article http://www.luminous-landscape.com/done_that.htm on The Luminous Landscape). Anyway after the usual routine of Downloader, BreezeBrowser, Photoshop and LinearSharpen, I looked at them and, not for the first time, considered the question in the subject line.

Don't you just love this stuff?

Cheers,

[mrchips]

I second that motion and your pics are awesome. Great work!

[Leighow]

ROGER

Great kit and lucky for us that you are on watch in England.

I assume that the LIS means image stability. (I once considered their IS binoculars, but have yet to spring for a pair.) If so, I assume that that helps with the low shutter speed.

Anyway thank Mother Nature for the rain.It gives guys like you the greatest gardens. And foxes. And then in Autumn it gives you the burn-offs in the fileds that smell so-so good.

HOWIE

PS: My Fatherin law was from Bleuberry (spelling ?) in the Berkshires.

[Rudi]

You won't get any arguments from me... :)

[UK_Terry]

leighow wrote:
ROGER


PS: My Fatherin law was from Bleuberry (spelling ?) in the Berkshires.


Hi i suspect that is Blewbury which is a small village just outside of Didcot a few miles south of Oxford.

[Phil Hall]

Like your photos, unfortunately we will not have any rain in Santa Ynez until the fall. But we do have a kit fox.

How do I attach a photo?

[Leighow]

PHIL
****
See this instruction under "Help" -- namely, you have to load the photo onto your IP and embed its URL as between the outer and inner img brackets. In what follows, I have added three dots here and there ... to let this appear below -- but you have to use the exact code given under help: EMBED IMAGE: [...img...]....http://blah.com/blah.gif....[.../img....] Love to see a fox photo !


UK-Terry:
*******
Thanks. I "should know" ... visited the village a decade or so ago. It was beautiful.


HOWIE

[T a z]

Great shots, Roger. Sometimes a simple display of nature's color is all it takes to cheer us up on a dreary day.

About your workflow...I see you are still using LS, as am I, but did I see a post of yours somewhere mentioning a change you did in the ColorMixer? I've played around with various settings trying to see if I could eek out just one more measure of vibrancy and tonal balance, but I haven't found anything yet that works better (on a consistant basis, anyway) than the one's Pekka has included.

Just wondering if you've found any particular custom combination of your own that you think might have improved on the original. If so...would you care to share? :)

Thanks,

-Taz

[Roger_Cavanagh]

Taz,

Hi, yes I am still using LS. I think the post you refer to must be about the new auto color command is PS7. I find this helps with low contrast images and where the histogram has a very restricted range.

I don't do this as part of my standard batch workflow as I have found that it is often necessary to juggle the options (found in Levels) - choosing "increase monochromatic contrast", "enhance all channels" or "light and dark colours" can make a _huge_ difference to the effect.

Another process I use quite a lot is Fred Miranda's Digital Velvia, but you have to be careful because it can blow detail in the reds (pesky colour always seems to cause problems :) ). I have added an additional "very low" option. Again I always do this on a per image basis.

Essentially, like you I think LinearSharpen rocks! One adjustment I would like to make at some point (too busy on house maintenance at the moment :( ) is to add an extra sharpness option between normal and high. I process quite of lot of images using HQ Chooser and I think there's room to squeeze a bit more sharpness without adding noticeable noise.

Regards,

[T a z]

Roger,

Ahhh...those reds...those pesky reds! I do indeed know what you mean (even outside of using Fred's DV).

It's the skin tones in LS that I keep trying to tweak just a bit more using the Color Mixer and sometimes the Hue/Saturation adjustment...and it's always the reds that I'm trying to adjust. By the way, quite often whenever I'm trying to adjust things using the Hue/Saturation adjustment, I've found I sometimes do better by adjusting the Lightness slider rather than the Saturation or Hue sliders.

Speaking of the new AutoColor adjustment...wow! A real "Auto" setting in PS that actually does quite a nice job. I'd stayed away from it at first (simply on principal ;) but have recently started playing around with it and it seems to do a good job...especially with low contrast images as you mentioned.

On another note...why oh why did you have to mention the "Optional" settings in Levels? I've conveniently ignored them all this time, but after your post, I've begun to experiment a bit. Thanks to you, now I've yet another adjustment feature I'm growing addicted to twiddling around with! :)

By the way, the adjustments I'm often trying to make within LS are usually very minor. Linear Sharpen does such a superb job as it is, I usually just stay with how it came out from my batch mode run. Its strongest suit is, of course, the sharpening. I have found no other combination of adjustments or stand-alone program that does a better job...period! (My hat is still off to you Pekka for your wonderful craftsmanship and your willingness to share.)

Good luck, Roger, with your attempts at adding the extra sharpening level. Somehow I get the gist that you'd much rather be doing software improvement than home improvement.

Take care,

-Taz