Is Nikon intending to abstract the esence of focus stacking?

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ChrisR
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Post by ChrisR »

An infinite objective used with an unintended FL tube lens still focused at infinity, sensor side. It changes the image circle & magnification, but is optically sound as far as I can see.

If I'm hearing correctly, the smallest step size in focus distance (sensor to lens) the D850 will make in an auto-stack is FL/30. Not too hard to have a stab at working out what that does to the focused distance with an objective mounted, but "not much" if it's near infinity. If it works with the screwdriver type AF, there are some hacking possibilities.
Chris R

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Post by RobertOToole »

rjlittlefield wrote:
mawyatt wrote:The TIFFs were created in LR in sRGB Color Space and 16 bit channels, no other processing was done to these files in LR (that I know about?).
The key lies in those last few words.

If you open the Develop tab in Lightroom and look around, you'll find a large number of controls in major categories like Basic, Tone Curve, Detail, and others. Under Basic you'll find white balance, exposure, contrast, and others, and under Detail you'll find sharpening and noise reduction.

Regardless of whether you set those controls, all of them are set somehow, and they all apply to raw conversion whether you know it or not.

--Rik
Guys, Always make sure the calibration setting is set to the standard setting with Nikon cameras, this will mimic Nikon's in-camera colors. This is the same control with PS or LR.

Image

Also this is something else to be aware of:

Deriving Hidden Baseline Exposure Compensation Applied by a Raw Converter

https://www.rawdigger.com/howtouse/deri ... mpensation

Hope this helps.

Lou Jost
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Post by Lou Jost »

Robert, that is very interesting. I do not have a "Camera standard" option in my PS/ CC2016, nor do I have "Camera neutral" or "Camera flat". I have "Camera muted" which you don't have, and a few that you do have. These are under "Process 2012".

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Post by RobertOToole »

Lou Jost wrote:Robert, that is very interesting. I do not have a "Camera standard" option in my PS/ CC2016, nor do I have "Camera neutral" or "Camera flat". I have "Camera muted" which you don't have, and a few that you do have. These are under "Process 2012".
Hi Lou,

The choices depend on the body type used to take the photo. PS or LR only loads the choices for your body type.

Robert

Lou Jost
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Post by Lou Jost »

Thanks, that explains it!

All Ex
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Post by All Ex »

I guess that is what is referred in Ps CC 2017 as image settings (by default is checked the camera raw default option)
In the bottom line, you cannot do a shooting with infinity corrected microscope objectives using the D850
Can you do it with finite ones?
All--Ex
My YouTube initial video

mawyatt
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Post by mawyatt »

RobertOToole wrote:
rjlittlefield wrote:
mawyatt wrote:The TIFFs were created in LR in sRGB Color Space and 16 bit channels, no other processing was done to these files in LR (that I know about?).
The key lies in those last few words.

If you open the Develop tab in Lightroom and look around, you'll find a large number of controls in major categories like Basic, Tone Curve, Detail, and others. Under Basic you'll find white balance, exposure, contrast, and others, and under Detail you'll find sharpening and noise reduction.

Regardless of whether you set those controls, all of them are set somehow, and they all apply to raw conversion whether you know it or not.

--Rik
Guys, Always make sure the calibration setting is set to the standard setting with Nikon cameras, this will mimic Nikon's in-camera colors. This is the same control with PS or LR.

Image

Also this is something else to be aware of:

Deriving Hidden Baseline Exposure Compensation Applied by a Raw Converter

https://www.rawdigger.com/howtouse/deri ... mpensation

Hope this helps.
Robert,

Thanks for the input, I was not aware of this option/feature in LR. My previous images were with the default LR Adobe Standard setting. I converted the RAW files with this now set to Camera Standard as you suggested. Here is the result crop.

Best,

Mike

LR Generated 16 bit TIFF with Camera Standard RAW conversion
Image

LR Generated 16 bit TIFF with Adobe Standard RAW conversion
Image

Nikon D800E Generated 8 bit TIFF In Camera
Image

RobertOToole
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Post by RobertOToole »

mawyatt wrote:
Robert,

Thanks for the input, I was not aware of this option/feature in LR. My previous images were with the default LR Adobe Standard setting. I converted the RAW files with this now set to Camera Standard as you suggested. Here is the result crop.

Best,

Mike
Hi Mike,

You can re-set the setting as a default, go to the pull down menu in ACR/LR, and select save new defaults, then save, then select set new ACR defaults.

Then after that when you load an image file from that camera it will apply all the new settings. You can always go back to the defaults in the same menu.

For the ultimate control you can create a new custom profile for even better colors by using a ColorChecker Passport target and creating a new calibration setting. I own one and this works very well.

http://xritephoto.com/colorchecker-passport-photo

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Post by mawyatt »

Robert,

Agree I should set this to the default in LR and PS. I have an old Spyder Color System which I believe will do the same as the Passport. I've only used this system when the color has to be near perfect for the final images.

Thanks for all the info.

BTW looks like my D850 will be in the next batch whenever that is!!

Best,

Mike

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Post by RobertOToole »

mawyatt wrote:Robert,

Agree I should set this to the default in LR and PS. I have an old Spyder Color System which I believe will do the same as the Passport. I've only used this system when the color has to be near perfect for the final images.
I believe I had the spyder also

The passport system is pretty interesting if you haven't seen one. You shoot the target and load it into PS or LR and load it as a calibration slide so the PS/LR engine looks at each color swatch tile and sets a new color calibration tab with the new settings. So this calibrates your camera color response. It really helps with Nikon greens, Canon reds, those hard to get right colors.

It works great when you really have to nail a color accurately.
mawyatt wrote: BTW looks like my D850 will be in the next batch whenever that is!!

Best,

Mike
I am hoping for the same , I was told next week, but officially its on Sept 18 or soon after. Not that I am in a big hurry but it would be nice to get my hands on one :D

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Post by rjlittlefield »

mawyatt wrote:My previous images were with the default LR Adobe Standard setting. I converted the RAW files with this now set to Camera Standard as you suggested. Here is the result crop.

LR Generated 16 bit TIFF with Camera Standard RAW conversion
Image

LR Generated 16 bit TIFF with Adobe Standard RAW conversion
Image

Nikon D800E Generated 8 bit TIFF In Camera
Image
I feel like I must be missing something.

The "LR Generated 16 bit TIFF with Camera Standard RAW conversion" shown here is much brighter than the "Nikon D800E Generated 8 bit TIFF In Camera".

But earlier,
Robert OToole wrote:Always make sure the calibration setting is set to the standard setting with Nikon cameras, this will mimic Nikon's in-camera colors.
The results seem inconsistent with the recommendation.

What have I missed?

--Rik

mawyatt
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Post by mawyatt »

Rik,

Thats the way they came out. Before stacking, the Camera TIFF and the two LR generated TIFFs were all different. Camera TIFF darkest and LR generated Camera Standard TIFF brightest, LR generated TIFF Adobe Standard in-between.

I'm not that well versed on LR nor PS, maybe Robert can help us here? Seems like exposure and some color variations?

Mike

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Post by RobertOToole »

mawyatt wrote:Rik,

Thats the way they came out. Before stacking, the Camera TIFF and the two LR generated TIFFs were all different. Camera TIFF darkest and LR generated Camera Standard TIFF brightest, LR generated TIFF Adobe Standard in-between.

I'm not that well versed on LR nor PS, maybe Robert can help us here? Seems like exposure and some color variations?

Mike
I have never used the camera to output a TIFF file directly.

The camera standard calibration setting supposedly mimics Nikons in camera standard colors when in review mode. This is when the camera is set to the standard picture controls in the camera menu. I don't think this has much to do with brightness.

I do know that Adobe uses hidden exposure compensation. That is even with the control sliders set to 0 there are still changes being made to the files. This might be related.

This is copied from the article: https://www.rawdigger.com/howtouse/deri ... mpensation

The goal of this article is to demonstrate how you can find the hidden exposure compensation your converter is applying to your raw files when opening them. We will be dealing in depth with Adobe’s converters, but the same method stands for any other converter.

There are at least two practical reasons to investigate hidden exposure compensation in raw converters. The first one is to improve exposure practice; the second is to determine which highlights can be brought back safely. That hidden exposure compensation is the exact amount you can pull the exposure slider to get the highlights back, before the software resorts to interpolation to guess what was in the blown-out highlights.

In the previous article, we demonstrated how to linearize (to zero out) the default settings in an Adobe raw converter, or in other words, how to override Adobe’s hidden corrections to contrast, brightness, black level, and tone curve (actually, in film terms, all of the above is characteristic curve).

The algorithm was pretty straightforward:

Open an Adobe raw converter
Switch to Process Version 2010 (PV2010) and
Set the Curve to Linear,
Set the Black point, the Contrast, and the Brightness all to zero
Switch back to Process Version 2012 (PV2012); now all of the settings are changed automatically and they replicate the “look of brightness” of the image you previously had in PV2010.
We demonstrated in the previous article that the brightness is now in “repro”, linear mode, except for Baseline Exposure.
For Adobe raw converters, the zeroed-out PV2012 (without accounting for Baseline Exposure compensation) has the following settings:
Exposure = -1 (yes, minus one stop)
Contrast = -33
Black = +25
Custom Curve (the converter, be it ACR or Lr, will automatically calculate it for you when switching from PV2010 to PV2012)

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Post by rjlittlefield »

rjlittlefield wrote:I feel like I must be missing something.

The "LR Generated 16 bit TIFF with Camera Standard RAW conversion" shown here is much brighter than the "Nikon D800E Generated 8 bit TIFF In Camera".
mawyatt wrote:Rik,

Thats the way they came out. Before stacking, the Camera TIFF and the two LR generated TIFFs were all different. Camera TIFF darkest and LR generated Camera Standard TIFF brightest, LR generated TIFF Adobe Standard in-between.
...
Seems like exposure and some color variations?
Well, I'm never surprised when the colors are different, only when they're the same!

But in this case the discrepancy is a lot more than I would have expected. Certainly exposure is wrong, and by so much that it's hard to tell about anything else.

This all gets back to my point about those many controls, which are present and doing something even if they're "out of sight, out of mind".
mawyatt wrote:I'm not that well versed on LR nor PS, maybe Robert can help us here?
For what it's worth, I always feel like I'm on shaky ground too.

One thing that concerns me is the possibility that defaults will get changed in some way that was not intended and may not be obvious, so that when somebody says "all I did was X", what they really mean is "all I did was X (and Y and Z and Q, none of which I knew about)".

This discussion is getting pretty far away from this topic's title of focus stacking. Probably we should start a new topic, specifically about raw conversion. Perhaps it could evolve into a FAQ.

--Rik

mawyatt
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Post by mawyatt »

Rik,

Agree on all these points. Back to the focus stacking issues, the 8 bit TIFF that the Nikon D800E produces "in camera" seems to be pretty good for me, that's why I've been using it for so long.

Also agree, other TIFF stuff going on behind the scenes is another topic.

I'll start another topic on TIFF specifics.

Best,

Mike

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