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[OM] Re: various musings...

Subject: [OM] Re: various musings...
From: ScottGee1 <scottgee1@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 13:55:38 -0400
AG's comment raises a point I've only recently considered.

I recently made some portraits of my 14 y.o. niece at her request. 
Poor kid bears a bit of resemblance to Paris Hilton and is being
encouraged to play it up.  But I digress.

Used an EOS 10D (new to me) at ISO 400 using 90 t/s lens to create a
very limited plane of focus.  We edited for expression on a TV set
(standard tube) on which they looked fine.

When I opened the selects in PS, I was disturbed to note obvious grain
in the OOF areas and that the plane of focus was not as extensive as
it appeared on the TV screen.  Because I was in a hurry, I simply
cropped to her selected sizes, applied USM (unsharp masking, in THIS
case - LOL!!!) and got the files to the lab.

The prints (8x12) turned out to be a pleasant surprise.  Zone of focus
appeared to be how I originally envisioned it and grain was pretty
much imperceptible.  In fact, they looked pretty much how they had
appeared on the TV

In a way, I accidentally conducted an experiment about resolution
perception.  The results contradict my expectations.

>From what I understand, resolution, from low to high in this case
would be: TV, computer screen (CRT, none of those LCDs for me!) and
print.  Thus, I would expect prints to most readily reveal flaws.

Yet, the pix looked their worst on the CRT.

This sort of reminds me of comments from a lot of camera salespeople
about the Oly E-10 just after it was introduced.  When asked about
'grain issues', they'd say something along the lines of, "Yeah, heard
about it, but look at these prints!  They just look better than the
ones we're getting from other cameras!"  At that time, the competitors
were the D30, D1, etc.

I suspect some of this is down to viewing distance and good ol'
perception.  I 'ooh' and 'aah' over what I see in National Geographic
while my friends who shoot large format look at the same pix and snort
about "golf ball size grain" and "limited tonal range".

Bottom line, it makes me wonder if the Internet, in its screen based
myopia, has spawned a whole lot of intense criticism about something
that is a minor issue to those of us who enjoy prints.

Maybe all of this has been discussed before and if so, my apologies
for the redundancy.

Your thoughts?/ScottGee1


On 6/14/05, AG Schnozz <agschnozz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> C.H. Ling wrote:
> > Don't know about how Bob made his shot but here is one at
> > ISO800 and warm light (bad to noise) full size of 1.36MB JPEG.
> > http://www.accura.com.hk/P2108869.jpg
> > Really that bad at noise?
> 
> I find that the original file size holds very well, but resizing
> seems to exasperate the high ISO noise.  Case in point would be
> my Cubs game photos. Resized for the gallery (25% size
> reduction), makes the images look pretty noisy.  However in
> print they appear pretty fine, indeed.
> 
> In reality, I'm getting unprocessed ISO 1600 shots blown up to
> 8x10 that look pretty much like print film ISO 400, but with
> greater resolution.  Throw a little Noiseware at the file and
> noise is a non-issue in print.
> 
> Could I stand cleaner performance?  Of course.
> 
> AG
> 
> 
> 
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