These are tools of my father. My father was a master carpenter and entrepreneur, though his business never got even mid-sized. In a way he was – and still is – always the working man.
It is years ago that I took this image. Just look at the file name or the URL: mid-August 2006! That’s before I began this blog.
I’m still here in Carinthia, beautiful autumn days outside, the trees in their most glorious colors, I confined to the apartment, sick of being sick. Well, not much longer. But of course I was not outside yesterday, thus the archive image.
For no particular reason I began looking for an image from the beginning, browsing my early D200 images in chronological order and … they suck. They really do. Most of them do. No that’s not really differentiating, most of my images still suck, but on any given day, I can be sure that I will have a workable image.
Not so then. Oh my! Not only did my images suck, I made so few of them! I didn’t even properly try to make them not suck.
I can best see it in framing. Today when I frame an image, I normally know what I do. I attempt a certain effect, and this is so pronounced, that even after a long time, even if I don’t remember the exact incident, I can immediately see why I framed the image as it is, I understand what I wanted to achieve, even when the image was ultimately a failure. They are my images and I understand my images.
It’s not that I don’t recognize my early images, sure I do, but so very often I recognize them through the locations. I know the places, I can remember many of the incidents, but what I don’t recognize is the style.
Style? Huh?? Bold word for someone denying having one!
Indeed. Uhhh … well … there’s not only black and white, there are shades in between. I am slowly accepting the idea of style being more than a marketing instrument. I am still convinced that much of what goes as “style” is nothing but self-inflicted artistic petrification, annihilation of creativity from fear of changing from a formula that has been found to sell.
There is a deeper meaning though. While the word style is commonly understood as a characteristic of a particular artist’s work, that can be recognized by the recipient, even without knowing the artist, i.e. understood as a distinguishable property of the work, there is merit in looking at style from the artist’s perspective. Here, style is not a result, it is a process, and ultimately it is a way of thinking, a way of analyzing the world. I may frequently change tools, change between color and b&w, change between realistic post-processing and Photoshop plugins like Alien Skin Snap Art, I may do that from one image to the next, may do it within one post and change back with the next, but I change my way of thinking, of analyzing the world, only very slowly, and only due to an ever ongoing learning process.
This is what I mean when I say I don’t recognize my style in these old images. When I see them, frankly, I have no idea what I thought then. There is not much continuity with what I do now. The images could as well have been taken by someone else.
It’s pretty interesting to see how it all began and where the roots are of how I work today. I have not gone back to the early 5 megapixal Kodak images, I guess I should view them systematically as well, but I guess it won’t make much of a difference. What finally made a difference, was when I bought my second SLR lens.
My first lens was a Nikon 18-200 VR, and when I bought the D200, this long range was actually a step back from the even longer range of the Kodak. I was just used to zooming and to the universal availability of all focal lengths.
My second lens was a Sigma 30/1.4, my first prime, and though I can’t remember why exactly I bought a prime at all, I suppose it was the “myth of primes”, it immediately made a difference. Constricted to a frame of a certain size, I began to compose. Not being able to zoom, made me work harder, think deeper, and from that time on I see images that I can identify with. These are images that I have put thoughts into, and the ways of those thoughts are still traceable for me.
Now, what can be learned of all that? Two things:
Productivity may not be the only key to improvement, but it helps a lot. My productivity increased tremendously, when I began to publish a daily photoblog. If you want to get better, there is no better thing than practice, and the rigid discipline of a daily blog is keeping you practicing more than you otherwise would. It’s not as intense as doing it as a job, but it leaves you more freedom to explore.
The second thing is: the “myth of primes” exists for a reason. Restrictions make you work harder, and that improves your work as well.
The Song of the Day is “The Working Man” from the 1968 self-titled Creedence Clearwater Revival debut album. Hear it on YouTube.
It simply had to happen. Today is the first day since November 21 that I have not shot a single image. Wet snow, a constant drizzle, fog below, clouds above, I don’t even feel bad about it 
I spent a lot of time though, trying to get back into my bookmaking workflow, checking out Shutterfly (as recommended by Mark Hobson), trying to create a template, and so on and on and on. I guess you know how much time runs into those things, especially when you do them only once a year.
Basically this serves three purposes (“among my purposes are such diverse things as”): SoFoBoMo ‘09 is nearing, by then I want to have the process worked out, and this time I won’t stop at the PDF, this time I want to hold a book. #2 is that Mark Hobson recently teased everyone to make a real book, and #3 is of course that Ted constantly buggers me to finally make that god-damn bicycle book
Speaking of Ted, this is another image from that morning in fall 2007, when we met to shoot the sunrise at Firenze’s Duomo.
The Song of the Day, “Sisters Of Mercy” by Leonard Cohen, is part of the soundtrack of Robert Altman’s 1971 movie “McCabe & Mrs. Miller”. I am not sure if it was written for the soundtrack or not, but Cohen’s music greatly contributes to the overall atmosphere of this masterpiece. See a video on YouTube.
In Saturday’s post we saw that DxO 5.3 performs fine on the noise front, but it won’t boost your D300 to ISO 25600. Well, at least it did not boost mine, I suppose it won’t do yours either
In all that pixel peeping we have completely ignored what other things DxO can do. Today’s image is old as well. I have not shot a single image today, not even test shots.
This one was shot in the cloister of the dome of Magdeburg, Germany, in early June 2006. Here is the original JPEG out of the D200. It does not exactly show my abilities at their best. It is tilted by accident, the subject, the cross, is hardly visible at all against the strong back light. This is clearly a case when I would have had to use a flash. I can’t remember if I had been allowed to do so, maybe not, fact is that I didn’t.
The Nikon 18-200 VR, the only lens that I had at that time, is nice, but it shows strong barrel distortions (well, actually something more complex than simple barrel distortions) on the wide end, and I even had to point the lens slightly upward to get everything into the frame. Not exactly ideal for an architectural shot.
DxO handled all that nicely. The 18-200 is a supported lens, thus all distortions were removed automatically, along with chromatic aberrations. Using Photoshop’s “Shadow/Highlight” to lighten up the foreground would have produced halos, thus I would normally have used a curves layer with a luminance mask. DxO does this with one slider under “DxO Lighting”. Basically they analyze the image, automatically isolate regions according to tonal value, and then apply contrast and exposure to these regions independently. This works really well and is extremely easy.
For the correction of tilt and perspective distortions I have used a simple tool where you paint a rectangle into the image and then drag the corners of the rectangle to indicate the desired correction. You can immediately see the outcome in a second window. I have first seen this in Paint Shop Pro and always missed it in Photoshop. You can choose to automatically crop the result.
Well, that’s it for Sunday. This series of posts about DxO will go on as I discover things or find ways to demonstrate features that I like.
The Song of the Day is “The Cross” from the 2002 Blind Boys of Alabama album “Higher Ground”. Sorry, no video.
Yesterday I did not shoot anything but some test images, none of them did I want to make Image of the Day. This is from the archives, an image from the crypt below the Dome of Speyer, Germany. I shot it with the D200 in July 2007, using the Nikon 18-200 VR at f8, ISO 1600 and 1/3s, handheld. I’ve converted it with DxO and added some local contrast later in Photoshop.
I am still in Carinthia, it’s Sunday now and I have managed to install DxO 5.3 yesterday evening. We can carry on with the review.
Let me begin with a correction. In “741 – Just Another Day On Earth” I originally said that “what Adobe Camera RAW does and DxO seemingly not, is the automatic elimination of hot pixels“. This is wrong. Yesterday I found out that DxO can automatically eliminate what they term “dead pixels”, it’s only not on by default, and it is hidden down in the options for noise reduction. Sorry for the false alarm.
In a comment to that post Nick Jungels said that
“Looking at DxO Optics, the noise performance seems very, very similar to running Noise Ninja. At least in my one comparison the pictures were virtually identical (as far as noise goes).
Have you compared the DxO versus any of these other noise reduction options?
At that moment I had not, this is what I want to look into today,
and here is the image that we will look at in some variations and detail. You see now why I used an old image for the Image of the Day?
I made three versions of this image: At ISO6400 and correctly lit, at ISO 3200 and one stop underexposed, and finally at ISO 3200 and underexposed by three stops. All three images were shot handheld with the D300 and the Sigma 50/1.4 at f4. High ISO noise reduction in the camera was set to “low” (from a standard of “normal”), exposure times were 1/60s and 1/250s. Fairly normal values for low light street photography. Let’s begin with a 100%crop:
You really have to click on the image for the 100% view to see the differences. Left is the result of Adobe Camera RAW 4.6, in the middle the same with Noise Ninja applied, and on the right is the output of DxO.
As to processing: First I have created the DxO image on standard settings, with the preset for high-ISO images applied. This produces stronger contrast, dark shadows, uses stronger noise reduction and also takes care of dead pixels. Then I have loaded the original RAW file into Adobe Camera RAW, without sharpening and with the exposure parameters set to automatic. Later in Photoshop I used adjustment layers to match this much lighter image to the look of the output of DxO. Basically I pulled all there was into Photoshop, and then toned it down, along with all noise. I think this is fair and as comparable as it gets.
There are quite some differences. Obviously the quality of Adobe Camera RAW without noise reduction is not really acceptable. There is a high level of noise, grain is coarse and we see much color noise as well.
Applying Noise Ninja made the image much better. This is not the detail that we expect from a 12 megapixel image, but for ISO 6400 it is the best that we can get without inventing detail.
DxO delivers a tad more sharpness, but that was to be expected as it did some sharpening and Adobe Camera RAW was set to do not. What’s obviously better, is color noise. Noise Ninja took care of the high-frequency color noise, but some low frequency noise, i.e. big color blotches, remained. The difference is not dramatic, but it is there.
Looking at the differences at 200% is more revealing. DxO produces a very fine grain on pixel level, Noise Ninja struggles with color noise. Overall I’d say that the result of DxO is more pleasing, looks less like digital artifacts, but you really have to care about pixel peeping to get a kick out of it.
Let’s do the same once again, this time with an image taken at ISO 3200, but underexposed by one stop. At 100% we see basically the same situation.
Please ignore the systematic tonal differences and the color difference in the dark tones. That’s an artifact of my method. I simply was not able to exactly match outputs. Let’s concentrate on noise instead.
Noise levels are slightly lower, the difference between Adobe Camera RAW + Noise Ninja and DxO is hardly visible.
At 200% it’s pretty much a tie, but from the looks I’d prefer DxO again. The fine grain actually looks nice, not like typical digital noise at all. On the other hand: both are clearly acceptable.
Then I turned to the ISO 3200 image underexposed by three stops, effectively pushing the image to ISO 25600, and this is the point where DxO breaks spectacularly. I did not even include a 200% comparison here, it is obvious. DxO smudges away detail like mad. I have tried for quite some time to find settings that would improve the result, but to no avail. In fact, this seems to be the best it can do under these conditions.
And Noise Ninja? Still riding the waves. The result that it produces is unusable as well, but compared to DxO it does not break, it degenerates slowly.
What’s the verdict now? If forensics is your job and you need to get the last information out of an image, even if you won’t be able to use it for any aesthetic purposes, then Noise Ninja is your tool. In any other case DxO seems as good or better, partly depending upon your aesthetic preferences.
In my eyes this result is not disappointing, not at all. After all, Noise Ninja is one of the best noise reduction plugins on the planet, one of three or four tools that constitute the state of the art. That DxO plays in that league and maybe slightly tops it, is quite remarkable, given that noise reduction is only one card in DxO’s game.
What about the price? Currently Noise Ninja and Neat Image cost around $70, Nik Software’s
f="http://www.niksoftware.com/">Define 2.0 is sold by Amazon for around $80, while DxO Optics will cost you $170 or $300, depending on your camera. Thus you’ll clearly have to need something else out of DxO’s portfolio to justify the purchase.
We’ll look closer into these things in other posts. Stay tuned.
The Song the Day is “This Is A Test” from Wendy James’ 1993 collaboration with Elvis Costello Now Ain’t the Time for Your Tears
Sorry, no sound samples, but looking for Wendy James on YouTube will give you some videos and an idea of what to expect.
This is one for Ted Byrne. Not much art on my side here and nothing about DxO either. The review continues as soon as I have it installed here in Carinthia (it’s a pain over my slow and not very reliable connection), or otherwise am back in Vienna. Have a nice weekend.
The Song of the Day is “Oh, How The Ghost Sings” from the 1981 Lester Bowie album “The Great Pretender”. No video, of course, but the sound sample at Amazon will give you an idea
These are images of Thursday. I took some in the morning and then late in the evening. All images were converted with DxO 5.3, but with the exception of the last, none was shot at particularly high ISO values.
Speaking of DxO, I’m just speeding through the documentation to get an impression of what a workflow with this tool could look like.
My first impression, just from working with the program without any consultation of the docs, was one of overall simplicity. There are two versions, a standalone program and a Photoshop/Lightroom plugin. I don’t have Lightroom, thus I can’t say how it’s activated there, but in Photoshop you get into the plugin via “File / Import”. Makes sense after all.
Once in the program, regardless which version, you are first presented with a file browser where you can select the images that you want to process. DxO is a batch/pipeline oriented program and employs a “Project” metaphor. A project can contain any number of images. Those get processed in a batch and the result is either that all images are opened in Photoshop (plugin) or get stored in a format of your choice, in the same or a different directory as the original (normally RAW) files.
As I said, I’m just now looking into the documentation. All images so far were processed in “experimental mode”, and I can say that the user interface is intuitive and simple. You begin on a “Select” screen where you include images into your project, walk through a “Prepare” screen where you can specify how each image is to be converted and then start the conversion on a “Process” screen. On my quad-core processor, processing was two images at a time, we’ll see what it does on a dual-core processor when I have installed it in Carinthia.
Speaking of multiple installations, the program has to be activated and activations can be transferred from one computer to another, but as far as I have seen, activation on at least two computers is permitted by one license. That’s quite OK. The idea is to have it on one Desktop and a laptop. We’ll see how that finally turns out for me, because I regularly use two desktops and a laptop.
DxO has one fully automatic mode, a lot of image presets, e.g. for slightly low or high key processing, one tuned for high ISO images, presets for different saturation/contrast combinations, etc, and of course you can set everything manually and save that as a preset.
Whatever you do on the “Prepare” screen, manually setting details or applying presets, it is always immediately displayed in a big preview that can be zoomed in up to 200%, thus you always exactly see what you do.
If you don’t set anything at all, the image gets converted in fully automatic mode, and what that does is usually quite OK. It may not be your desired look, but so far it has always produced a usable result. Automatic processing includes geometry correction for supported lens/body combinations. Some of my combinations are supported, some not.
All of the images in this post were converted by the plugin version using presets. Then I have added further processing in Photoshop, but usually not much.
What Adobe Camera RAW does and DxO seemingly not, is the automatic elimination of hot pixels. This is a bit of a bummer, but no worse than Capture NX.
EDIT: Sorry for the false information, by now I have found out that DxO in fact can automatically eliminate hot pixels, it’s only a tad hidden and not on by default.
One final thing that may be interesting from a workflow perspective: The standalone version of DxO can produce linear DNG files, i.e. DNG files that already contain a demosaiced image. These files can be processed by Adobe products and retain the flexibility of RAW files. I’m not really sure about the consequences, but this could mean that it would be possible to batch-convert all your files and e.g. apply only demosaicing and noise reduction. Anyway. We’ll see soon.
That’s it for today. This series of posts about DxO will continue as long as I learn useful things. Stay tuned.
The Song of the Day is “Just Another Day” from Brian Eno’s 2005 album “Another Day on Earth”. Hear it on YouTube.
OK, finally there’s one image of Wednesday, almost plainly out of DxO 5.3. It’s ISO 1600 from a Nikon D200 with Sigma 30/1.4, a combination that is supported by DxO for automatic lens correction. I think you won’t be able to tell from this resolution (even if you click on the image for the higher resolution) how much better the RAW conversion is, especially compared to Adobe Camera RAW. Nikon’s own conversions are slightly better but still inferior. I shall post some examples as we go along with a series of blog posts that will end up as a sort of review of DxO 5.3, but upfront I can already say that the examples on their website don’t lie. The quality improvement is dramatic.
They achieve this by removing noise not after demosaicing but before, directly on the RAW data. This makes sense, because a conventional Bayer sensor uses a pattern of interwoven pixels, half of them green (where the human eye is most sensitive), and a quarter each red and blue. That means that the actual resolution of the sensor for green is half of what you’d expect from the pixel count, and for red and blue it’s only a quarter each. Demosaicing is a process of interpolation, where the full resolution red, green and blue channels are reconstructed from the actual data in the reduced channels and from luminance information from the neighboring pixels of another color. Scary, huh? That’s for precision.
The only sensor type on the market that does not use such patterns at all (some by Kodak and Fuji use different patters or variations) is the Foveon sensor used in Sigma’s cameras, although at the price of much reduced actual pixel resolution. Those pixels upscale well, but an image resolution of 2640×1760 (4.6 megapixels) does not look so sexy today. That impression is further marred by a light sensitivity that’s slightly below today’s standards.
But let’s get back to Bayer sensors and the process of demosaicing. We’ve seen that the actual image is reconstructed from greatly incomplete data. I’d even say much of it is invented. Of course this technology is not new and the algorithms are fairly mature, but it is also clear that at high ISO noise starts to spread out. When neighboring pixels are used to reconstruct the exact color channels per pixel, then noise in those neighboring pixels comes into the equation. This sums up, and the result are ugly blotches of color or strong de-coloration as a consequence of noise reduction algorithms.
This is where DxO sets in. They reduce noise on the original pixels before they get combined in demosaicing. Therefore the noise in one pixel does not spread out to neighboring pixels. What exactly they do and how they do it is not known to me, is most probably patented or secret, but the results are clearly better than everything else that I’ve seen so far, producing very fine grain without much loss of detail and without much loss of color at high ISOs.
It’s really like a camera upgrade, i.e. the improvement is about the amount that you’d expect by going from one camera generation to the next. The Imaging Resource has quite a lengthy interview where these things are explained and where a D700 image is shown, taken at ISO 6400, underexposed by 3 EV and pushed to 51,200 equivalent. Crazy? Yes, but surprisingly there is still usable output.
The Song of the Day is “Tell Me You’ll Wait For Me” from Ray Charles’ 1959 album “The Genius of Ray Charles”. Sorry no video, but Amazon has samples.
This morning was the first morning with fog here in the city. This means we’re headin’ for a fall gals! I’ve made some pictures of a foggy park, they are even not so bad, but I’ll spare us the cliché. It’s autumn, summer’s long gone and that must suffice.
This is an image that I shot on my way home. It is not the first image that I’ve taken of this venerable motorbike, but it is the first that gets published.
The Song of the Day is “Dirty Old Town” – not the David Byrne song from “Rei Momo“, not the Rod Steward version, no, it’s the Pogues that who have it on their 1985 album “Rum, Sodomy & the Lash“. See the video on YouTube. This is a true classic, you don’t want to miss it
Super Stupid Things To DoTM.
What about some of that? Uhhh … what could I come up with? Wait a minute … yes! That’s it. Traveling with a bag full of lenses, but leaving your camera behind! Oh dear, I’ve left my D300 along with the Sigma 50/1.4 in Carinthia, only to be recovered on Friday.
There are two roads from here
Probably I’ll never get a better excuse for buying a D700. On the other hand, reason tells me that I currently spend so much money in that moving adventure, that I’d better not.
Normally I’m strictly adverse to listening to reason, but this time I did. When I sold my D200, almost a year ago, I secured the option to borrow it back should need be. Then I had thought of the D300 being sent in for service or such, but now it comes handy as well.
Here we are. Today’s images were shot with a D200. It’s still an incredibly capable camera. Apparent differences are the LCD and the much more sluggish scrolling in full zoom, but when I had it, I did not miss any speed. It’s only that the D300 is much faster and you get accustomed to that.
Both images were shot within five meters distance where Burggasse meets Sankt-Ulrichs-Platz and I’m quite pleased with both of them. The leaves were not arranges, but I admit having removed some peripheral distractions, most of them physically while being there
The Song of the Day is the incredibly beautiful “Map Of The Stars” from Melissa Etheridge’s 2007 album “The Awakening“. Make sure you see her perform live on YouTube.
Yesterday’s food is from the can. I was short on time in the morning, and when I left for the train, the light was utterly flat and uninspiring. I could have delayed photographing to the evening, but on the other hand I had plenty of time for post-processing while on the train.
I always carry a bunch of files with me in a folder “TODO”, and for lack of anything better to do, I began processing some of them.
The decaying house front is not far from where I live. When I am late and take the way to work via the Underground, I always pass by, but this particular image was taken about a year ago, in the afternoon. I used my Nikon 50/1.2 and was on the way to a concert where I wanted to use this fast lens.
The next image, a garbage can in Mariahilfer Straße in Vienna, was taken last August with the then new Sigma 20/1.8. It was early morning on a bright day with blinding sunlight, and I liked the contrast between the modern design and the traces of … uhmm … neglect.
The final image, the Image of the Day, is from that Sunday morning in Florence/Italy when I was photographing with my friend Ted Byrne. This image was taken while Ted was on the other side, making the first image that he posted from Florence.
This is one of those images that I always wanted to process. I tried it one time and did not particularly like the result, so it went back into the “TODO” folder. Much to Ted’s annoyance I took all my images that morning from the tripod and I really took my time. Just as I was satisfied with the framing, a white car drove by to park in front of these poles, right in my image. I pressed the shutter only a second before. The sidelight is from the car’s head lights. While the original would have been nothing but a failed attempt, this side light makes the image, and that’s also what was so hard to bring out in post-processing. I was just a lucky man
The Song of the Day is “Lucky Man” from ELP’s 1970 debut album “Emerson Lake & Palmer“. See something like a video on YouTube.
