G
Guest
Lynn, I don't know about other forum members, but I have 4 other digital cameras that are balanced to my current monitor, printer, scanner set-ups. I can't adjust it all just for this camera.
On another note, since I'm stuck with the ND, I figured that I would stop bitching asbout it and try to discover it's strengths. If I speak to a shortcoming it will be to try and share a solution I've discovered or ask what some of you have done with the same problematic situation. The buffer question was already answered, so that's handled. Here's a test:
I set up the ND with a 85/1.4 on tripod in my studio using an Elinchrom Octabox with a Profoto head powered by an Acute 12 generator as a main light, and a moveable 7' white flat for bounce. 2 Elinchrom Mono heads mounted in Strip lights were used as spill lights on the mottled brown painted cloth background. This is a set up I just used to do a portrait with the Contax 645 & Kodak DCS ProBack. The 85 was stopped down to f/8, 11 & 16 as a bracket head and shoulders study of my long suffering wife. (For now I've given up on the RAW
setting as I also see a magenta cast and experienced terrible moire' noise when converting to tiff). So I set the camera to capture ISO 100 Tiff in camera, set X for mode, manually focused and then shot to a 512 16X CF card and directly read it with a Firewire CF card reader.
RESULTS: the flesh tones were dead looking so I adjusted in PhotoShop: increased some contrast and punched up the saturation. It all looked better but the blacks blocked (which I noticed that this camera does often). Solution: I ran a PhotoShop actions program from Fred Miranda called "Shadow Recovery" that was designed for the D1-X but also works for my other digital cameras. Bingo! Blacks fell into line much better. ( available very inexpensively at: www.fredmiranda.com).
Experiment #2: I took a close up head shot and converted it to B&W. Where (for me) this camera is problematic in the area of color capture, especially of people, it's B&W conversions are very good, second only to my 16 meg Kodak ProBack among my digital cameras. It had a B&W film look to it and that was a big discovery for me since I shoot a lot of B&W at weddings.
The controlled studio experiments tell me a couple of things; 1) B&W showed me that the lenses are increadibly sharp and the capture CCD resolution is as absolutely crisp as can be and even rivals film. 2) The software that is dealing with color capture sucks, and is the weak point of the whole system.
Software can be fixed, so the camera can be fixed. Contax....are you listening?
On another note, since I'm stuck with the ND, I figured that I would stop bitching asbout it and try to discover it's strengths. If I speak to a shortcoming it will be to try and share a solution I've discovered or ask what some of you have done with the same problematic situation. The buffer question was already answered, so that's handled. Here's a test:
I set up the ND with a 85/1.4 on tripod in my studio using an Elinchrom Octabox with a Profoto head powered by an Acute 12 generator as a main light, and a moveable 7' white flat for bounce. 2 Elinchrom Mono heads mounted in Strip lights were used as spill lights on the mottled brown painted cloth background. This is a set up I just used to do a portrait with the Contax 645 & Kodak DCS ProBack. The 85 was stopped down to f/8, 11 & 16 as a bracket head and shoulders study of my long suffering wife. (For now I've given up on the RAW
setting as I also see a magenta cast and experienced terrible moire' noise when converting to tiff). So I set the camera to capture ISO 100 Tiff in camera, set X for mode, manually focused and then shot to a 512 16X CF card and directly read it with a Firewire CF card reader.
RESULTS: the flesh tones were dead looking so I adjusted in PhotoShop: increased some contrast and punched up the saturation. It all looked better but the blacks blocked (which I noticed that this camera does often). Solution: I ran a PhotoShop actions program from Fred Miranda called "Shadow Recovery" that was designed for the D1-X but also works for my other digital cameras. Bingo! Blacks fell into line much better. ( available very inexpensively at: www.fredmiranda.com).
Experiment #2: I took a close up head shot and converted it to B&W. Where (for me) this camera is problematic in the area of color capture, especially of people, it's B&W conversions are very good, second only to my 16 meg Kodak ProBack among my digital cameras. It had a B&W film look to it and that was a big discovery for me since I shoot a lot of B&W at weddings.
The controlled studio experiments tell me a couple of things; 1) B&W showed me that the lenses are increadibly sharp and the capture CCD resolution is as absolutely crisp as can be and even rivals film. 2) The software that is dealing with color capture sucks, and is the weak point of the whole system.
Software can be fixed, so the camera can be fixed. Contax....are you listening?