Before and After: Lets see yours :)

Here is a sad-looking little dog I photographed through a front gate, but could not get close and could not do anything about the glare on the window. So I cleaned it up as best I could...

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Luke, have you tried using Viveza2 to lighten shadowy areas? I find its excellent for dealing with small areas. Its part of the Nik suite which I gather you have.

Here's an example. A dead leaf bunch in my tuckeroo tree which I photographed for no apparent reason. It was/is dark and dismal. I wanted to retain dismal for this example but to lift the dark dead bunch somewhat

View attachment 109208
deadleaf by kyte50, on Flickr

I used a Viveza control point on a small area of the left side of the bunch of leaves and increased brightness a smidge to match it to the lightness of the rest of that area. After saving that, I then lightened (just a bit) the whole shot, as well as doing some sharpening.

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deadleaf2
by kyte50, on Flickr

I'm not presenting this as being in any way good, or how I think things ought to be done... its just a bit easier when you don't want to lighten a whole image, just to get a small section of shadow lifted. Point, click, slide, done. Hope the shots are visible, I'm doing that "private" thing you suggested.
 
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Rajiv, what that a tripod shot at base ISO or handheld at higher ISO? I'm guessing a tripod shot to pull that much out of the shadows without a lot of obvious noise...

-Ray

Hi Ray, my apologies, missed seeing your question. The D800e was definitely on a tripod. a big honking studio tripod in fact. A Manfrotto Triaut 058B with a heavy Junior Geared Head. I was bracketing shots at ISO100 (f16) and this was the darkest image of the series. Ever since I realized that I could recover this much data from the darks, I have stopped bracketing my shots during sunset. I only ever bracket nowadays in very high contrast daylight scenes.
 
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Was just tossing some of the garbage file from my NYC trip and I ran across the original raw file of one of my street shots. It's a shot I was pretty happy with and got some notice, and seeing the original was a stark reminder of the process of seeing, shooting, seeing again (the file this time), and processing. After processing, this shot ended up about how I saw it when I was shooting it and got what I was going for when I shot it. But what I initially captured wasn't at all what I saw or what I was trying to get across. And it also speaks well of the DR and recoverability of the DF, even if it's not quite as great (in good light like this) as the higher res Sony sensors used in the D750 and D810. Although on this one, the combination of small aperture (zone focus) and fast shutter speed drove the ISO high enough that the DF actually has a DR advantage over the higher res models. I think they cross somewhere around ISO 400 and this is at 560. So close to the cross point, but certainly no DIS-advantage to the Df here...

Here's the after, so you can see what I was going for and ultimately got:

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NYC - day 5-88-Edit
by ramboorider1, on Flickr




And here's the before. When I first saw the file I just sort of figured I'd missed on that shot - not a big deal because I miss way more than I get. But I saw enough in it to keep the file. And then when I started playing with it, damned if my intended image wasn't hiding in there, deep in the weeds. And it ended up being one of my two favorite street shots from my 10 days in the City... This is not that unusual with street shooting. It's not spray and pray in the sense that you're shooting indiscriminately. But it's tough enough to nail the moment and the framing and the light in such fleeting moments, so sometimes you have to look real hard at the results to see if what you were after is hiding in some of those files. And occasionally it is... And good equipment helps a LOT. I wouldn't have gotten this shot with many cameras that aren't as good as the Df...

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NYC - day 5-88
by ramboorider1, on Flickr

-Ray
 
A rather interesting thread, this before and after stuff. I have to join in. My before was taken a few days ago, in the fish/meat department of a local supermarket. Saw a row of fishes, whose glassy upturned eyes seemed to be staring at me, so of course I had to pull out the Ricoh and take a few snaps. But this one, the best of the lot, didn't quite turn out the way I wanted, the way I saw it.

FishMarket-SOOC.jpg


So, I dived back in and fiddled a little (the fiddling was done in LR5 and also with one of X-Equals nifty monochrome film emulation presets) and wound up with this, which seemed - and still seems, to me at least - much closer to the spirit of what I was looking for -

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Fish Market
by La Chachalaca Fotografía, on Flickr

Now, looking back, there are a number of things about the 'Before' that I still like. But when all's said and done, the 'After' is why I wanted to take this picture.
 
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This is the latest version of my custom demosaic software, and one I am happy with.

Leica M9 using a Yellow Y48 filter over the lens,

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M9_as_shot
by fiftyonepointsix, on Flickr

FORTRAN program Mono3. Direct conversion to Linear-Monochrome.

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M9_LinearDNG_Direct
by fiftyonepointsix, on Flickr

I figured out how to modify the DNG file to work with Lightroom, Photoshop, and the DNG Codec for Windows. They all think it is identical to the M Monochrom, even show the Thumbnail in monochrome. The image has a lot of Depth to the pixels.

Another from the same batch conversion,

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M1012676_small
by fiftyonepointsix, on Flickr
 
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