January 2013 - Digital Group - Mono Conversion

Meeting Notes March 2009 to 2018.
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spb
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January 2013 - Digital Group - Mono Conversion

Post by spb » Thu Jan 10, 2013 1:25 pm

NEWS

Another useful group camera test at dpReview: Enthusiast Zoom Compacts. The Sony RX100 did well again and it is interesting that although this boasts a large 1" sensor for a compact camera it is still much smaller than the APS-C sensors in D-SLRs and will therefore be at a disadvantage in low light conditions.

Thanks to Andrew Bungard for referring us to Gizmo's Freeware which is a site that recommends free software in many categories for many devices. As a test, I looked at the Image Viewer category and it recommended my favourites, Faststone and XnView which is encouraging. It also listed Zoner which I have not previously encountered. Any users out there?

Another recommendation from a friend's IT professional is Ninite - a site which automatically installs and updates up to 90 common freeware programs. It would appear to dramatically simplify the process of building a new PC or updating an existing one. I've not yet tried it - any feedback?

DIGITAL COLOUR TO MONOCHROME CONVERSION

Fundamentalism may be a response to the complexity of modern life. Even photography is not immune with a small but growing number of film and darkroom enthusiasts. They mostly seem to be resurrecting mono and early historical processes - few will be enthusiastic about the drum processing and printing of colour film that I endured in the 1980's.

Like the revival of vinyl records, I suspect that there is a large element of romance, nostalgia, unpredictability and plain old perversity in this retro movement but I was wondering if desktop printing is a genuinely weak link in the digital process. All domestic printers are 8-bit which means that they can only distinguish 256 shades of grey. Is this enough? To test this I printed a 256 greyscale step wedge on my Epson R3000 printer and the sharp edges of each step, whilst detectable in Photoshop with the Info palette, were not visible on the print. This would appear to indicate that 256 shades exceed the ability of my eyes to detect and so any future move to a 12 bit (4,096 shades) or 16 bit printer (65,536 shades) would not produce a visible improvement.

I would argue that digital cameras have now exceeded the capabilities of film, and inkjet printing papers now give every possible finish that could be desired, so I am left unconvinced that there is any rational reason to return to film, whilst absolutely applauding those who choose do so. However, I won't be joining them!

Getting back to the nuts and bolts of digital monochrome, there are many ways to convert convert digital colour images and these are discussed in a paper on the Mono Group page of the APS website which I have updated.

LIGHTROOM DEVELOP MODULE

Having previously talked about importing, sorting and selecting our images with the Library Module, we now need to process them with the Develop Module.

In the Basic palette, controls such as exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows etc will be familiar to anyone using the Adobe Camera Raw. A very useful addition is the Graduated Filter tool which can apply any combination of adjustments to a graduated mask - for example to darken a sky. Any number of masks can be added, adjusted and deleted as required. The White Balance picker can be used to adjust the overall colour of the image.

In the HSL (Hue, Saturation, Luminance)/Colour/B&W palette, a tool enables us to drag directly in the image to affect specific colours and tones.

All adjustments are applied non-destructively and are listed in the History palette. The Reset button cancels everything. The YY button shows a before-and-after view which can be made full-screen with the Tab key.

The power of Lightroom to process large numbers of images is illustrated by selecting multiple images in the filmstrip at the bottom of the screen and then using the Sync button to apply the current image adjustments to them all. This would be particularly useful for adjusting multiple images of the same subject under the same lighting conditions, for example.

USING ADOBE CAMERA RAW FOR JPG IMAGES

Although the ACR module in Photoshop/Elements is intended for adjusting Raw images before editing them, it is possible to use it with other image types such as JPG. Select Open As… instead of Open… and after navigating to the chosen image, select Camera Raw in the Open As box at the bottom of the dialogue.

This will not give you the ability to recover lost highlights or shadows in the way that you can with true Raw images but it will give access to some very useful tools, in particular the Noise Reduction feature which is much better than in Photoshop itself.

NEXT MEETING

Thursday 7th February.

Cheers, Steve Brabner.

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