2 issues with my 40D and a plea for H. E. L. P.!!!!

Hello everyone: I have upgraded to the 40D from the 20D and there are a lot of cool things here. I have two issues/questions however:

1. I noticed that the file size is actually SMALLER (3 meg/average) on the 10mp camera, while the old 20D (8mp camera) averaged about 3.5 or 4 meg. WHAT THE H@#L?

2. This is the 'biggie'. I notice that when I am in their "standard" picture style, the highlights are TOTALLY blown (even with the custom function to correct this) and the colors are TOTALLY over saturated. The only fix I have found for this is to use the "faithful" picture style and mess around with sharpening after the fact. Has anyone had this issue?

Lastly: I print a lot of 8x10s for people. I noticed on an older 1d mk2 that you could get a focus screen with two black vertical lines that in effect showed you where the crop lines are. Has anyone tried to put one of these on a 40D? Does Canon make one ? HELP!!

My overall answer for both issues: shoot in RAW format. Try out Adobe Lightroom in conjunction with the RAW images - I've never seen a need for JPEGs in the camera since I tried it. Picture styles and such only affect JPEG images.

acigarnut wrote in post #4534442
I notice that when I am in their "standard" picture style, the highlights are TOTALLY blown (even with the custom function to correct this) and the colors are TOTALLY over saturated. The only fix I have found for this is to use the "faithful" picture style and mess around with sharpening after the fact. Has anyone had this issue?

Do you notice this issue on your computer or on the camera's LCD? Unfortunately my 40D's LCD doesn't accurately display colors, saturation, contrast or sharpness, but pictures on the computer look good...

timnosenzo wrote in post #4534548
Do you notice this issue on your computer or on the camera's LCD? Unfortunately my 40D's LCD doesn't accurately display colors, saturation, contrast or sharpness, but pictures on the computer look good...

The problem is on the computer, and thus the actual file. I know the screen is a bit "off" and I only use it for reference. The screen ROCKS by the way compared to the 20D.

I think the Standard Picture Style is Canon's attempt to provide P&S type jpgs for those who like that sort of thing. If I were to shoot jpgs I would probably choose Neutral, as I do if I use DPP. Mostly I use another converter and screw the images up all by myself.

As regards the file size question, obviously they are compressing the 40D jpg more. If that bothers you the only remedy is RAW.


There are interchangable screens available for about $35, I think. You could try taking your screen out and etching or even Magic Markering it. If it doesn't work out it will only cost you 35 bucks to replace it. There was a photo tutorial on changing the screen posted on this forum a few days ago.

I know that color and saturation are often times a matter of personal taste but I find my 40D produces good jpegs out of the camera on the standard picture style setting. I also use the standard picture style setting as a starting point for most of my raw processing because I like well-saturated colors. I don't find it to be over-saturated or garish and I don't find it any more saturated than anything I used to shoot with my 20D. Is it possible that the hue, saturation and/or contrast were accidentally increased in your picture style settings?

As far as the exposure, I find that most photos actually tend to underexpose a bit and in situations where the highlights might be a problem, I can usually watch the histogram and keep the highlights protected. Highlight priority does preserve more detail in the highlights at all picture settings but I don't find it to be a huge difference from what I get without it.

If you shoot in high quality Jpeg or even Raw, and the files are smaller in weight (not physical pixel size) than with your old 20D, how about your 40D camera has a better algorithm to compress files.... or even less noisy files, that should decrease the weight of the files right there. Also, hight contrast images will be different in size than low contrast images.

Not sure why your images should be blowing the highlights unless you actually do blow them with a bad exposure. I have my camera set to "Neutral" to be sure that it doesn't add any contrast or saturation that might blow any highlights. See if that setting might work for your better, as it should be zero'd settings all over the board.

As for cropping for 8x10 (evil format if you ask me), since your viewfinder only shows 95% of the actual image, it would take a lot of math to figure that out. But you could always put some black tape on the LCD screen on the back, and make sure when you chimp that you won't cut off anyone's head or limbs after the fact.

acigarnut wrote in post #4534442
Hello everyone: I have upgraded to the 40D from the 20D and there are a lot of cool things here. I have two issues/questions however:

1. I noticed that the file size is actually SMALLER (3 meg/average) on the 10mp camera, while the old 20D (8mp camera) averaged about 3.5 or 4 meg. WHAT THE H@#L?

2. This is the 'biggie'. I notice that when I am in their "standard" picture style, the highlights are TOTALLY blown (even with the custom function to correct this) and the colors are TOTALLY over saturated. The only fix I have found for this is to use the "faithful" picture style and mess around with sharpening after the fact. Has anyone had this issue?

Lastly: I print a lot of 8x10s for people. I noticed on an older 1d mk2 that you could get a focus screen with two black vertical lines that in effect showed you where the crop lines are. Has anyone tried to put one of these on a 40D? Does Canon make one ? HELP!!

Questions:

1. What PP software are you using? Some software cannot do anything with blown highlights; some cannot even recognize them (DPP). Lightroom and CS can do both.

2. What metering mode is your 40D set to when highlights get blown? Depending on the subject, this can have a huge effect.

3. Why not shoot RAW, and set Picture Styles to NEUTRAL, and set CONTRAST to minus 2? This will get your histogram (which is a JPEG) closer to the actual RAW exposure levels.

Comments:

1. Sharpening is NOT the way to correct blown highlights.

2. This thread might be useful:

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=411402

Glenn NK wrote in post #4535118
Questions:

Some software cannot do anything with blown highlights; some cannot even recognize them (DPP).

This is not the case. The most recent version of DPP has warnings for shadow and highlight clipping and no software Lightroom included, can recover highlights that are fully blown. If the highlights are fully blown, there is no information and therefore nothing that can be recovered. Highlight recovery can only work on highlights that are not completely blown and any software that allows you to adjust the raw exposure settings (i.e any raw convertor) can recover over-exposed highlights as long as the area still contains some info. The advantage of ACR/Lightroom over DPP when it comes to highlight recovery is that you have an extra stop of exposure you can recover in ACR/lightroom.

To answer your first question, the 40D either captures or stores images at 72dpi, whereas the older models do it at 180dpi, hence the confusing (smaller file) sizes on a 40D despite the higher MP.

Dream Merchant, the dpi (which is in fact ppi) has no meaning at all to the size of the files. Sorry.

Dream Merchant wrote in post #4535956
To answer your first question, the 40D either captures or stores images at 72dpi, whereas the older models do it at 180dpi, hence the confusing (smaller file) sizes on a 40D despite the higher MP.

Totally incorrect. DPI has no impact on the actual file size. The DPI parameter is only used when the image is sent to an output device. Until you do that, DPI is meaningless in terms of the file size.

Oh, ok. Thanks for the heads up.

Does that mean that what was asaid earlier about the files being 'more compressed' is true? If that's the case, would it affect image quality up to say ... 12"x16" prints since JPEG is already a 'lossy' format?

@ Dream Merchant. Help us help you. Half you question is on size and the other on IQ. Unless I missed it you did not state the mode you were shooting in. RAW, sRAW or jpg? Your file size hints at it and the last post does too but I would like to hear it from you.
Can you post a blown image with exif data with lens type in tact so we can pick at it for you? Some of us love this stuff.
I only shoot RAW but none of the IQ complaints you report are common to my 40D.

Full JPEG quality will always be the best. As technology evolves the technique to compress files gets better. So it might not be such a big difference in size from a camera made 3-4 years ago from a camera that was released just 6 months ago. The camera manufacturers always work on new ways to tweak the algoritms to make better compression. It's not the same as the files compressed in Photoshop for instance.

But image quality has nothing to do with compression of a jpeg (well not alone), as there's always better image chips, resolution (amount of pixels), etc, in each upgrade of a camera. So there's a lot of different things that comes to play when it comes to image quality.