example of 6 stop push in post

Jan 13, 2013
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Sporgon said:
You guys have gotta be kidding. The originals of those sunset shots are so under exposed it would be unbelievable if I hadn't seen it here.

Keep under exposing the Canon like that and you'll sure get crap shadows. You'll also get crap totality on an exmor type sensor but that seems to be quite acceptable to some.

Sporgon my friend, you have NO right to complain after having said ... this -

Sporgon said:
You exposed to just hold those highlights in the sky. What's the good of that ? You could have under exposed them by five stops just to be sure that nothing was within five stops of being blown. Just because you have a nice new 1DxII with a meter in it doesn't mean you have to sail so close to the wind ! Now if you'd under exposed by the correct amount you'd then be looking at a seven stop lift, and the 1DxII can't do it ! Seems like you need one of the guys from DPR to come and show you how to under expose properly. ;)

;D
 
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Sep 3, 2014
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Aglet said:
And, in the example I provided, there's no "lack of tonality" because there's still plenty of shadow data remaining.

But it's 6-stops being discussed. That's the difference between your deep foreground shadows being recorded in a 1-second exposure versus a 1-minute exposure. You didn't push it that hard. As discussed before, I don't believe your scene is one which canon sensors would struggle to capture. Here's a similar one (albeit with the sun slightly higher):
index.php



The scene I showed on the previous page is more difficult. If I were to re-shoot that with my 5D3 and attempt to lighten those beams similarly (+4 + 100), they'd turn into a red grid (again, I haven't used the latest generation so I don't know how for example 1Dx II would handle it). Because of the lower read noise on my A7R II (on which that was shot), I am able to brighten that shadow area significantly... but there's nothing there.
 
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Sporgon

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Aglet said:
You'll also get crap totality on an exmor type sensor but that seems to be quite acceptable to some.
Are you speaking from experience?

I have used, amongst others, D800, Sony a7, Pentax K5. When I used the Nikon it was to assess the 36 mp resolution against what I had; I didn't bother with looking at shadow lifting.

I don't have many images exposed the way you like, but here is one shot on the K5, a camera that DxO says has 14.5 stops of DR. I purposely under exposed it to hold all the cloud around the sun to see what would happen when I lifted the rest of the image.

Below is the result. The first shot is at 100 ISO and the straight DNg, the second is lifted 6 stops. The tonality is totally crap and unacceptable to me. All sense of tone has gone, and we are left with a regular pattern noise. True, the Canon was much worse, with irregular colour noise, but so what ? I don't want either.

The third picture is shot at 100 ISO on the 5DII, straight into the sun, one hour and a half hours after sunrise. I hid the sun disk behind the far right stone work. The last picture is a 100% crop from this frame. Compare the colour and tonality with the 6 stop lift exmor. There is no comparison. Of course this shot is a three frame bracket.

Unfortunately I didn't do a bracketed shot of the boats because I was just concerned with seeing the results of an under exposure.
 

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Sporgon

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J.R. said:
Sporgon said:
You guys have gotta be kidding. The originals of those sunset shots are so under exposed it would be unbelievable if I hadn't seen it here.

Keep under exposing the Canon like that and you'll sure get crap shadows. You'll also get crap totality on an exmor type sensor but that seems to be quite acceptable to some.

Sporgon my friend, you have NO right to complain after having said ... this -

Sporgon said:
You exposed to just hold those highlights in the sky. What's the good of that ? You could have under exposed them by five stops just to be sure that nothing was within five stops of being blown. Just because you have a nice new 1DxII with a meter in it doesn't mean you have to sail so close to the wind ! Now if you'd under exposed by the correct amount you'd then be looking at a seven stop lift, and the 1DxII can't do it ! Seems like you need one of the guys from DPR to come and show you how to under expose properly. ;)

;D

;D ;D

Had some training doing it the 5 stops under method ;)

See above.
 
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Sporgon

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I've just realised that in the exmor six stop lift I showed in the post above ACR was applying colour noise reduction, which I had meant to take off. So here is the actual exmor lift with no noise reduction.

Sure, it's way better than the older generation Canon cameras, but still useless to me as far as a viable alternative to correct bracketing is concerned.
 

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Feb 26, 2012
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Sporgon said:
The third picture is shot at 100 ISO on the 5DII, straight into the sun, one hour and a half hours after sunrise. I hid the sun disk behind the far right stone work. The last picture is a 100% crop from this frame. Compare the colour and tonality with the 6 stop lift exmor. There is no comparison. Of course this shot is a three frame bracket.

I think I was expecting a 4th image to be included in that series, the 100% crop of a 3-shot bracket?...

but just looking at the 3rd image, I'm seeing lots of clipped black areas, like the black level was raised a bit to boost overall contrast. Which is fine, artistically, if that's what you're going for; it works for this shot.

With all the natural texture available, and the amount of daylight available, i think this shot would have been an easy one-shot and curve adjust with a D800 to get the same result without blending bracketed shots and it would have retained more tonal detail in shadow areas than is evident here. Might have lost a touch more of the brightest bit of cloud. I'd have started w my kit at iso100, f/8 and 1/2000s and tweak as needed. And it's all static, so bracket-stack is a viable option whatever you're shooting.

But that's a good example. I wish I had some nice architecture around here like that to shoot.
 
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Feb 26, 2012
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Sporgon said:
I've just realised that in the exmor six stop lift I showed in the post above ACR was applying colour noise reduction, which I had meant to take off. So here is the actual exmor lift with no noise reduction.

Sure, it's way better than the older generation Canon cameras, but still useless to me as far as a viable alternative to correct bracketing is concerned.

It all depends on what you want as a final result. If you wanted those foreground boats to be very visible you'd sacrifice more highlite tonality for a one-shot with the K5 or you'd bracket so you could really lift those boats and hopefully not have to deal with larger waves that would be an obvious challenge as they move during the bracket series.

In the sunset example I provided earlier, I did not push those shadow areas that much as I really didn't want the footprints in the sand in the lower right to be very visible; they'd be a bit of a distraction from my intent.
If I did want to show them well then I'd have to bracket and do selective layer blending to keep only one set of waves... no fun for me.
 
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Sporgon

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Aglet said:
With all the natural texture available, and the amount of daylight available, i think this shot would have been an easy one-shot and curve adjust with a D800 to get the same result without blending bracketed shots and it would have retained more tonal detail in shadow areas than is evident here. Might have lost a touch more of the brightest bit of cloud. I'd have started w my kit at iso100, f/8 and 1/2000s and tweak as needed.

Actually I concede you are quite right here: the D800 would have eaten this up in one frame as the 5DII has very nearly done it in one exposure. I am attaching the middle bracket of this shot, which as part of a bracketed sequence is not optimised for a single frame, yet you can see that it is very nearly there, and this is not a 6D or 5DIII etc.

The first pic is the raw, the second the adjustment and the third shows that even on a 5DII, when exposed correctly, there is no issue with banding, FPN etc etc. Note all noise reduction was off.

So not a good example on my part, but my point was, and is, this:

You guys who use severe, chronic under exposure on the Canon to try and demonstrate a weakness do yourselves no favours when the same degree of under exposure would also cripple the exmor performance, as shown in my K5 example, and that wasn't anything like as under exposed as rista's example.
 

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Mar 2, 2012
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Sporgon said:
You guys who use severe, chronic under exposure on the Canon to try and demonstrate a weakness do yourselves no favours when the same degree of under exposure would also cripple the exmor performance

Interestingly put. Obviously it comes down to personal taste, because many people would argue that such a degree of underexposure doesn't in fact cripple data from exmor sensors. I can only conclude that they value lack of noise much more significantly than shadow tonality, perhaps because the former is more obvious to most viewers.

Personally, since I am not perfect and have vastly underexposed shots (generally when I suddenly change framing and don't adjust exposure settings quickly enough before I take the shot which caught my eye), I don't poo-poo the ability to lift shadows without creating distracting noise; it could easily make or break a shot which means something to me (like my son doing something special). It won't likely turn a mistake into an award winning photograph, however.
 
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Sporgon

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3kramd5 said:
Sporgon said:
You guys who use severe, chronic under exposure on the Canon to try and demonstrate a weakness do yourselves no favours when the same degree of under exposure would also cripple the exmor performance

Interestingly put. Obviously it comes down to personal taste, because many people would argue that such a degree of underexposure doesn't in fact cripple data from exmor sensors. I can only conclude that they value lack of noise much more significantly than shadow tonality, perhaps because the former is more obvious to most viewers.

Personally, since I am not perfect and have vastly underexposed shots (generally when I suddenly change framing and don't adjust exposure settings quickly enough before I take the shot which caught my eye), I don't poo-poo the ability to lift shadows without creating distracting noise; it could easily make or break a shot which means something to me (like my son doing something special). It won't likely turn a mistake into an award winning photograph, however.

I think that you have probably hit the nail on the head there. You only really run into trouble with the ( older generation) Canon cameras when you hit, or are very close to the buffers at the low light end, so values of around 0 - 5. That's because very little has been recorded, and if you lift you are rewarded with colour noise that people understandably don't like. With with the exmor you haven't recorded much at these levels either, but, as you say, many are quite happy with the grey, toneless image because there is very little colour noise and a regular pattern, which is not as objectionable.
 
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Jan 29, 2011
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Just to put a little context of the absurdity of this area of 'discussion'.

Here is a screenshot of an image I was just working on, I left it full sized so the adjustments and pixel RGB numbers can be seen. This is a straight five stop lift of an exposure that encompassed a wideish DR, the original (the image as shot on the left) has a tiny touch of clipping in the whites and no clipping in the blacks.

The only adjustment applied is a +5 stop on the exposure slider.

The cursor reads a before/after RGB values of
R: 0.0/77.9 G: 0.0/78.1 B: 3.2/89.2

Are we really arguing about a camera that can do one more stop lift than this 'better'? Who cares!
 

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privatebydesign said:
Just to put a little context of the absurdity of this area of 'discussion'.

Here is a screenshot of an image I was just working on, I left it full sized so the adjustments and pixel RGB numbers can be seen. This is a straight five stop lift of an exposure that encompassed a wideish DR, the original (the image as shot on the left) has a tiny touch of clipping in the whites and no clipping in the blacks.

The only adjustment applied is a +5 stop on the exposure slider.

The cursor reads a before/after RGB values of
R: 0.0/77.9 G: 0.0/78.1 B: 3.2/89.2

Are we really arguing about a camera that can do one more stop lift than this 'better'? Who cares!

Oh but look at that detail in the window! Some voyer might want to see that kind of detail! :)
 
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