Jez Cunningham wrote:
> Moose - can you share with us what you did?
>
I assume you are talking about the shot of W.H. Hearst's bedroom at San
Simeon?
> I'm guessing you made about 3 'developments' of the raw file with exposure
> 'bracketing'. (how big brackets?)
>
I'm pretty sure not. I don't remember details, as I did a bunch of these
at once. Generally, multiple conversions aren't necessary. Yes, I know
people do that and write about how wonderful it is in allowing them to
capture greater DR.
But -
Think about it. The A/D converter in most DSLRs until very recently (E-1
is an exception) are 12 bit. The RAW converter is taking 12 bit data and
putting it in a 16 bit output form. There is no logical reason at all to
need more than one pass. Like carrying 3 litres in a four litre bucket,
there's room to spare and nothing spills over.
I wish I knew more technical detail about how they do the expansion. In
any case, any loss of dynamic range can only come from defaults in the
RAW converter or the JPEG oriented settings from the camera that clip
the ends. Compression of the ends may give the appearance that data has
been lost when it is still there.
I only seriously use ACR and between the black level, highlight
recovery, exposure, brightness, fill light and contrast sliders (did I
leave one out?) I think it is always possible to get every bit of the DR
the camera has spread out in some fashion or other in one 16 bit image.
> Then combined them as layers.
>
As above, no.
> Then masked each layer and painted the area to be visible/hidden.
>
I did indeed create different layers, mask them and apply different
processes to them. The outdoor hills were probably dropped considerably
in brightness, then treated to several applications of LCE and some
Curves. Because of the way digital images are mapped, the highest part
of the data can hold amazing amounts of tonal detail that may be teased out.
The bright areas in the room were another layer given their own
treatment. The flat painted areas of the walls and ceiling between
drapes and fancy ceiling treatment were given their own, stronger NR
treatment. What shows as noise there contributes to detail in the other
dark areas that would go flat if sharpened that much. I assume others
use differential sharpening in that way.
In fairness, the before image out of my use of ACR to retain all tonal
detail is undoubtedly much flatter/duller looking than a JPEG would have
been. The shadow and highlight detail would be missing, but the middle
tones would be snappier. But I don't really know, as I essentially never
shoot JPEGs with the 5D.
> Then flattened, converted to 8-bit, jpeg.
>
Yes. I work in 16 bit Adobe RGB, then flatten, convert to 8 bit and to
sRGB, so color will be as good as possible with color profile unaware
browsers like IE and FireFox. After some testing, I fairly recently
switched to the new SI Pro II for downsampling. I often apply light
Intellisharpen II after the file is at display size.
I use an action (macro) that does the sharpening in a new layer. That
way I can adjust the overall effect by adjusting layer opacity. Not
uncommonly, I will add a mask to that layer and paint the sharpening by
area. What's just enough for one area may be too much for another.
Interestingly enough, sharpening at my default settings for small images
sometimes nicely picks up highlight detail in a way that sharpening at
full size wouldn't. I seem to recall that it really livened up the
hanging in this image. I've also seen it put that little extra sparkle
in hair and other such subjects.
> Or what? The result was superb!
>
Thanks! I was rather pleased. It was rewarding to take some rushed grab
shots and make them look like they wer done with tripod and lots of time.
Moose
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