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echinopsis posted:lol it’ll be my editing. I’ve set my camera to not go below 1/500 so shake is not an issue Why 1/500th? You're leaving a lot of usable shutter speed on the table there. Rule of thumb with film cameras with no stabilization was you can hand hold easily as the reciprocal of your lens length. So you should really be able to get down to 1/125th with no issue at all, get some depth of field back in so you don't need to miss focus when it goes for the necklace instead.
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Oct 16, 2023 23:18
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just buy a promist dude
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Oct 17, 2023 01:40
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echinopsis posted:it’s just an observation, based on who seems to like my work. in photo circles most of the time my work is ignored rather than critiqued anyway That's because you are terrible at taking critique so I stopped trying
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Oct 17, 2023 01:43
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bobmarleysghost posted:just buy a promist dude Doesn't have to be expensive either. I have a cheap rear end $10 white mist filter from Walking Way that I use for some harsh stage lights and it works really well on harsh light and softening skin some 
Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Oct 17, 2023 |
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Oct 17, 2023 03:09
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Megabound posted:Why 1/500th? just to stay on the safe side quote:Rule of thumb with film cameras with no stabilization was you can hand hold easily as the reciprocal of your lens length. So you should really be able to get down to 1/125th with no issue at all, not sure if this rule of thumb extends .. like you saw that 1:1 above .. the lens is so sharp with such good resolution, I haven’t tested it but I suspect at 1/125 it’s gonna be introducing some shake that might not be noticeable on film. I could be wrong of course (unlikely, you know me) quote:get some depth of field back in so you don't need to miss focus when it goes for the necklace instead. do you mean, shoot slower so can stop aperture down a bit? or just stop down aperture anyway? Megabound posted:That's because you are terrible at taking critique so I stopped trying I do appreciate your input, I’ve seen your other work on insta and you’re very good, and I know you know what you’re talking about. I still have my own ideas and vision though bobmarleysghost posted:just buy a promist dude um maybe I will!???? Megabound posted:That's because you are terrible  Bottom Liner posted:Doesn't have to be expensive either. I have a cheap rear end $10 white mist filter from Walking Way that I use for some harsh stage lights and it works really well on harsh light and softening skin some that looks sweet ngl
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Oct 17, 2023 04:03
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echinopsis posted:not sure if this rule of thumb extends .. like you saw that 1:1 above .. the lens is so sharp with such good resolution, I haven’t tested it but I suspect at 1/125 it’s gonna be introducing some shake that might not be noticeable on film. I could be wrong of course (unlikely, you know me) Then why are you destroying the lens' characteristics with lovely fake grain? e: learn how to hold a camera properly
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Oct 17, 2023 04:14
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ibis and optical stabilisation is very good these days, you can safely handhold at 1:1 ratio to your lens. also, (un)intended motion blur/camera shake can very be good, use it to your advantage.
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Oct 17, 2023 04:20
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bobmarleysghost posted:ibis and optical stabilisation is very good these days, you can safely handhold at 1:1 ratio to your lens. I don’t have either of these Health Services posted:Then why are you destroying the lens' characteristics with lovely fake grain? um it’s actually high quality artisan fake grain and because I prefer the look. start with the best ingredients to make the best meals imo.
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Oct 17, 2023 04:23
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*Rolling out my own pasta and importing tomatoes from Italy then covering it with Kraft Grated "Parmesan"* gotta start with the best ingredients
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Oct 17, 2023 04:29
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echinopsis posted:not sure if this rule of thumb extends .. like you saw that 1:1 above .. the lens is so sharp with such good resolution, I haven’t tested it but I suspect at 1/125 it’s gonna be introducing some shake that might not be noticeable on film. I could be wrong of course (unlikely, you know me) It won't, it'll be fine. There's nothing special about your digital sensor. If you'd see shake on your camera you'd see it in film. quote:do you mean, shoot slower so can stop aperture down a bit? or just stop down aperture anyway? Exactly this, if you don't want to touch your ISO you can slow your shutter speed so you can stop down your aperture to get a bit more depth of field. Half to a full stop would help out in that situation significantly.
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Oct 17, 2023 04:47
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echinopsis posted:the lens is so sharp with such good resolution You keep saying this, but the images you post (including the raw) don't show that. You're getting soft blurry images before you go on to make them softer and blurrier. What ISO are you shooting at?
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Oct 17, 2023 05:04
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Bottom Liner posted:You keep saying this, but the images you post (including the raw) don't show that. You're getting soft blurry images before you go on to make them softer and blurrier. What ISO are you shooting at? the (edited) photos I post yeah I've edited them. but am I wrong in thinking  is pretty good for 1:1?? is it really soft and blurry and I just can't see that?like, can I get some kind of reference that is significantly better so I can stop saying that it's good? Megabound posted:Exactly this, if you don't want to touch your ISO you can slow your shutter speed so you can stop down your aperture to get a bit more depth of field. Half to a full stop would help out in that situation significantly. hmm usually yeah I don't have a risk here, I just wide open because I am a basic bitch big black turnout posted:*Rolling out my own pasta and importing tomatoes from Italy then covering it with Kraft Grated "Parmesan"* gotta start with the best ingredients finally someone who gets it
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Oct 17, 2023 05:15
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echinopsis posted:hmm usually yeah I don't have a risk here, I just wide open because I am a basic bitch This is why your photos are soft, lenses sharpen up significantly once you get even 1 stop from full open
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Oct 17, 2023 05:28
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Yes, that one you got the focus right and held the camera steady. That does not seem to be the throughline in the photos you post though, you're shooting too shallow for some of your shots and your editing makes the in focus ones look low res and blurry too.
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Oct 17, 2023 05:28
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Full open is a last resort for me. If I have enough light and I want separation I'll still go 1 stop down from full open. If there's not enough light, and I have to drop my shutter to the limit of hand holding then I will shoot full open.
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Oct 17, 2023 05:39
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Megabound posted:This is why your photos are soft, lenses sharpen up significantly once you get even 1 stop from full open I don't think this is the reason. the implication here is that if I shot at f/2.0 or something that my photos would finally be sharp they're "soft" because I edit them so, the lens is not the issue its definitely a skill issue, and user error. the issue isn't the hardware
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Oct 17, 2023 07:00
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Try it, take a photo of a subject at you're usual distance, stop down 1 stop and take the photo again. You'll see a marked difference in sharpness all over the frame. It'll give you a better position to work from for your editing. You're also not arguing with me here, you're arguing against physics. In lenses this is called diffraction. An f/3.5 lens will be softer at f/3.5 than an f/1.8 lens and f/3.5 due to how light interacts with the very edges of glass elements. Megabound fucked around with this message at 07:29 on Oct 17, 2023 |
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Oct 17, 2023 07:07
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ok i’ll take your word for it and give it a shot, I’ve got two shoots tomorrow. I can accept having a less shallow depth of field could benefit me in certain situations but also - I’ve shared the raw file of that photo in yospos, can you open that file and tell me that the problem is that it’s not sharp enough out of camera?
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Oct 17, 2023 07:34
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  for visual examples. It's not just about increasing the focus area, lenses improve in image quality all the way up to generally f/8 or so. echinopsis posted:but also - I’ve shared the raw file of that photo in yospos, can you open that file and tell me that the problem is that it’s not sharp enough out of camera? Again, yes that one is sharp. A lot of yours are not though because of missed focus. But the raw looks much better than your edit. Your edit (left) looks like a raw file with bad white balance causing weird colors. I don't know why you made the changes you did to exposure to make it so flat and lifeless, but I undid that stuff to the clarity and tones while still keeping the color you seemed to be going for (middle). The right is a more natural color and white balance for that raw file.  full size https://i.imgur.com/WlxaulD.jpg Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 08:31 on Oct 17, 2023 |
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Oct 17, 2023 07:41
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imma just have to flat out disagree. the hair in your edit is just .. almost entirely black. can’t see poo poo lol and regarding white balance - “fixing” white balance is not about trying to make every photo have identical skin tones or whatever. when you take a photo during golden hour you don’t then cool the photo off to erase the golden/pink hues the sun gave you.. or at least you shouldn’t imo that photo was taken during pre-sunrise blue hour. didn’t get up at 5 and drive for over an hour to get to a location with great natural lighting to then eliminate all of those colours. like in this photo - I don’t think I touched the white balance at all .. because that’s how it looked when we were there. and “fixing” the white balance to make it look like just any other photo is boring as gently caress  but oh well I will have to get back to the drawing board I guess
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Oct 17, 2023 08:57
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echinopsis posted:ok i’ll take your word for it and give it a shot, I’ve got two shoots tomorrow. I can accept having a less shallow depth of field could benefit me in certain situations You are running into diffraction issues in that raw yes. It's overall not particularly sharp, not the best you could be getting out of a modern lens. I don't scan at particularly high resolution as I don't use web stuff as deliverables, but this print is from 35mm film, it's been enlarged from 36x24mm to 406x304mm and was shot on a 45mm f/2 lens with available light on a lens that is like 40 years old. Probably like f4 or f5.6 and it is sharp edge to edge with good micro contrast. Because you are shooting wide open you're not getting edge to edge sharpness and you're not getting that defined contrast that adds to the perceived sharpness of an image, diffraction is killing it.    You don't need to stop down far, 1 stop is OK. 2 stops would be even better. You'll still keep your shallow depth of field, especially cause I know you shoot exclusively with a 135mm lens, but you'll get better definition across your entire image.
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Oct 17, 2023 09:07
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echinopsis posted:can’t see poo poo Think we found your problem
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Oct 17, 2023 09:07
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Like, I get you're doing this work for clients. I don't know if you've reached out to them to build your portfolio or they've reached out to you because they like your style or a mixture of both, but I'd be very interested in what they'd say if you presented a couple of the different edits you've been given. If you're happy and they're happy then whatever, job done. But I hope you take a few of the things that we've been talking about here and try to apply them, even just testing out on friends, family and pets.
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Oct 17, 2023 09:15
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Megabound posted:But I hope you take a few of the things that we've been talking about here and try to apply them well I do have two opportunities tomorrow to sharpen my game 
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Oct 17, 2023 10:03
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With the clown theme I think the blue works. Although I agree the blacks are lifted too much IMO.
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Oct 17, 2023 17:19
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Popping to say thanks to all of you for this informative and honest conversation, I'm getting a lot of great bits as a hack portrait taker!
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Oct 17, 2023 17:30
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I missed the focus do you think its recovaerable
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Oct 18, 2023 10:18
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Bringing my piss jug to the shoot to create tones and vibes
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Oct 18, 2023 10:35
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Shoot me like one of your piss christs
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Oct 18, 2023 15:29
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Megabound posted:Bringing my piss jug to the shoot to create tones and vibes i didn't start drinking at 5 and hold my piss for hours to get a great urine color to eliminate all of those tones
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Oct 18, 2023 18:13
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bellows lugosi posted:i didn't start drinking at 5 and hold my piss for hours to get a great urine color to eliminate all of those tones lol
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Oct 18, 2023 19:28
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Bottom Liner posted:Think we found your problem Actually, I think echinopsis is right. Mostly. While the original edit is not perfect, and I think the blacks are too lifted, the two edits you've provided have crushed them to the point that the hat and hair have merged together into a solid black blob with no detail. And while the overall image may look a bit less flat, the face has lost all its contour and tonality and now it looks much too flat, especially next to the big dark blob of the hair and hat. The dark blob has now become the focal point of the image due to its contrast and 'weight' in the frame, rather than the viewer's eye being drawn to the face as the focus. Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of crushing blacks and sometimes whites, especially in monochrome photography which is most of what I do, but I don't think it's at all appropriate for these images in particular. Which leads me to my second point: You've also lost all of the 'dreamy' feel from the lighting conditions, and it honestly looks like the two new edits are trying to compensate for bad initial lighting rather than embracing the conditions as being intentional. Of those three images, I definitely prefer the first one as looking and feeling more like a completed and intentional finished product. The other two look to me more like a starting point that I would then try to fix, rather than being an end goal.
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Oct 18, 2023 21:09
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We were posting edits in another thread but yeah, I went in a completely different direction.
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Oct 18, 2023 21:28
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Yeah the blacks are too low, I spent all of 5 seconds doing those on the iPad to give them ideas. I maintain their edit looks like a raw file with bad white balance more than anything intentional or finished. Their blacks are grey and the overall exposure is way too flat. There's almost no contrast. It would be worth posting the raw file vs their edit, as they took almost everything in the wrong direction IMO.
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Oct 18, 2023 21:29
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Bottom Liner posted:Yeah the blacks are too low, I spent all of 5 seconds doing those on the iPad to give them ideas. I maintain their edit looks like a raw file with bad white balance more than anything intentional or finished. Their blacks are grey and the overall exposure is way too flat. There's almost no contrast. It would be worth posting the raw file vs their edit, as they took almost everything in the wrong direction IMO. The thing about suggesting improvements is that they ought to actually result in a better image, not a worse one. While I agree with some of your critique of the image, the two edited shots you posted have focused on the black levels and overall contrast to the point that you've made almost everything else about the image worse. Even in the original RAW, the skin is warm and the background cool - why would you make them both the same shade of muddy grey? This is removing contrast from the image - albeit colour contrast rather than tonal contrast - rather than adding it. The initial image has a certain feel about it - cool, vintagey, soft, dreamy and whimsical - which was presumably intended to convey a particular vibe or emotion to the viewer. I assume it was shot with that outcome in mind. Can the image still convey this feeling to the viewer while being technically better? Absolutely. I had a crack with the RAW file, and, interestingly, came up with pretty much the same result as Megabound, albeit erring on the side of a slightly less blown-out shoulder. His edit still conveys much of the same feel, while being technically better overall. That's an example of a suggested improvement that echinopsis might find useful to consider, whereas I don't think the images you posted have much he could look at, say "That's better than what I originally edited", and learn from. p0stal b0b fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Oct 19, 2023 |
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Oct 19, 2023 00:48
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It's personal opinion but I would say either of those are better by a large margin (as are basically every non-joke edit others have shared). My edits were using the raw exposure and much closer to the as-shot color they say they wanted to preserve. I didn't crush the blacks, I just didn't boost them to the roof with +47 shadows and +26 blacks like they did. They also used +35 luminance and +10 saturation, which is why the color is so off. There's nothing whimsical or dreamy about their edit, it looks like a bad raw file that needs a lot of work. It's a naturally high contrast shot so work with that instead of trying to remove it. Here's the actual raw which I maintain looks much better  Megabound posted:We were posting edits in another thread but yeah, I went in a completely different direction. This looks blown out and kills the hairlight which is IMO the best part of the shot. Here's how I would edit it to my style and not trying to interpret what I thought echinopsis is trying to do (like saying they use grain when their XMP has none)  The real takeaway here is that megabound was right and we're probably all getting more out of this than echino.
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Oct 19, 2023 01:33
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While we're talking about taking someone else's work in completely different directions, here's a totally non-suggested-improvement edit of the same photo, because I can't help clicking the drat B&W button whenever I open a photo, and I thought this might be a good place to talk about processing techniques we've discovered for portraits... If this is better suited for the post-processing thread, I'm happy to delete this comment and move it there... I've recently been experimenting with negative clarity settings for portraits in ACR. It only really works for monochrome - if you try it too much in colour, the tones get all muddy and fucky. But in black and white, you get this lovely smooth silent-film-esque glow around the highlights and the impression of nice smooth skin tones without the loss of detail and airbrushed feeling you get from pushing negative texture settings. I've also been trying a mask preset I've developed which softens and de-contrasts the outer edges of the image to sort of simulate a vintage lens effect. Sometimes it adds to an image, sometimes it just doesn't work, but when it does, it works sort of like a subtler vignette to draw the eye into the centre of the frame where the contrast and sharpness are unaffected. I'm sure it's not everyone's cup of tea, but it's been an interesting avenue to pursue.
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Oct 19, 2023 01:34
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Bottom Liner posted:
I like this last one more than mine, shows me that editing my landscapes is a very different skill set to editing portraits.
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Oct 19, 2023 01:43
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Bottom Liner posted:It's personal opinion but I would say either of those are better by a large margin If "either of those" is referring to the two edits with the dark blacks, I think personal opinion will have to do, because I disagree. Bottom Liner posted:Here's how I would edit it to my style and not trying to interpret what I thought echinopsis is trying to do (like saying they use grain when their XMP has none) Now this, this IS better by a large margin, although I still think a bit of cool in the background wouldn't hurt. Bottom Liner posted:The real takeaway here is that megabound was right and we're probably all getting more out of this than echino. I know I'm genuinely enjoying the discussion and learning a fair bit about what others prioritise in a finished shot. No sarcasm intended, in case it might come across that way...
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Oct 19, 2023 01:45
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Bottom Liner posted:There's almost no contrast. contrast is overrated imo regardless of my edit, something we don’t need to do with photos is edit them as if they were being marked in an exam where you were to try and get as many things correct as possible, maximise contrast but not too much, white balance the poo poo out of it, mask and etc. trying to make every photo “correct” is boring, especially if it’s just basically for fun/hobby and not for money alas there’s for sure some good advice here and I take most of it onboard. it’s pretty common for me to do an edit and then dislike it in the morning so who knows if I would have left that photo as is. regardless I’ve taken some lessons away so thanks to everyone. and thanks postal bob, for being the only one who got my vision, even if you didn’t love the edit itself
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Oct 19, 2023 01:51
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