The NIKON Thread (Talk About Nikon Stuff here)

[OverlordXenu]

Bigshot, what are your opinions on medium and large format?

[Poohblah]

i know you didn't ask my opinion, but here it is anyway:
medium and large format are great when you NEED more resolution: i.e. landscapes. however, even if you are making big enlargements, then careful control of grain is far more important than resolution. 8x10 and larger formats make incredible contact prints which makes printing easier and high quality too. but the biggest thing that large format has going for it is the ability to control the plane of the lens and film in order to manipulate converging lines and the plane of focus (assuming you are using a view camera). also, you can push/pull individual frames instead of the whole roll when you use sheet film in large format cameras.

digital, on the other hand, really needs more resolution to make large prints, because you end up with pixels instead of grain in big enlargements. that's the reason so many pro's use medium format cameras with digital backs in the studio.

[Arainach]

You may prefer grain to pixels in enlargements, but I'll take sensor noise over what happens to films at high ISOs any day.

[dvessel]

Not sure what sensor noise looks like in current cameras, but if they are like my D70, I'll take film grain. A lot smoother and uniform than the blotchy magenta and green. Very ugly.

I often photoshop out the CCD chroma noise and add more noise though photoshop so it looks closer to film.

[dj_mocok]

I've actually never seen a DSLR that has a noise like film grain. It's different. Maybe it's just me, but particular film grain can look beautiful to me and actually adds certain feel to a picture, whereas digital noise just look like impurity.

[milkpowder]

Originally Posted by dvessel

Not sure what sensor noise looks like in current cameras, but if they are like my D70, I'll take film grain. A lot smoother and uniform than the blotchy magenta and green. Very ugly.

I often photoshop out the CCD chroma noise and add more noise though photoshop so it looks closer to film.

Chroma noise, especially broad, blotchy chroma noise is horrible. It's incredibly difficult to get rid of without absolutely smudging all the fine details, that's why I try my best to avoid ISOs at which my cameras exhibit major chroma. Film grain is very nice. I love to add a bit of film grain to B&W photos.

[dj_mocok]

I want some sea lion pictures taken with Nikon DSLR.

[dvessel]

Originally Posted by milkpowder

Chroma noise, especially broad, blotchy chroma noise is horrible. It's incredibly difficult to get rid of without absolutely smudging all the fine details, that's why I try my best to avoid ISOs at which my cameras exhibit major chroma. Film grain is very nice. I love to add a bit of film grain to B&W photos.

It's actually pretty easy. You do loose some detail in the chromatic channels if seen through the Lab color space but if done right, can be pretty hard to detect.

Similar to how jpegs work in that the luminance is maintained but the color is less defined. That's how it achieves high compression. The eye is less capable of detecting fine edges for color as opposed to black and white contrast.

Something like duplicate channel, overlay the duplicate to "color" mode then apply a softening effect like median or smart blur. The really tough photos needs to be more selective, and your right, those are more time consuming and hard to work with.

[Hayduke]

Does anyone use Lightroom?

I started using it a few weeks ago when I was borrowing a Rebel XT. It seemed to slow down a bit with the RAW files, but now that I have my Nikon, it seems much much slower working with NEF files. Canon's CR2's seemed quicker. I know Nikon claims NEF has a high amount of lossless compression. Maybe that's the problem? Perhaps it's harder to decompress?

I'm thinking about converting everything to DNG format instead. Adobe claims DNG has even higher compression rates, but I'm hoping that Lightroom might be able to work with it easier.

Anyone else have thoughts on .NEFs and Lightroom?

[dvessel]

This might not help you Hayduke but Aperture has a "Quick Preview" mode which is blazing fast. I have read that Lightroom is quick too so there might be a similar setting to speed things up. Look up the docs.

I wouldn't bother myself converting to DNG. It's just more work for little gain as far as I can see. Maybe when it's accepted as an ISO standard and cameras stored it in that format by default it'll be different. At the moment, it's just another proprietary format and more work.