Home

Please support mflenses.com if you need any graphic related work order it from us, click on above banner to order!
SearchSearch MemberlistMemberlist RegisterRegister ProfileProfile Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages Log inLog in

Squirrels and Doves -- Canon FD 400mm f/4.5
Post new topic   Reply to topic
Home   Manual Focus Lenses
View previous topic :: View next topic  


PostPosted: Tue Apr 26, 2011 9:26 pm    Post subject: Squirrels and Doves -- Canon FD 400mm f/4.5 Reply with quote
Squirrels and Doves. These are the two most common wildlife species in my neighborhood. Neither is particularly easy to take pictures of because they are almost constantly moving.

Yesterday -- these images were taken with a Canon XS (1000D) and Canon FD 400mm f/4.5 lens. I used an FD-EOS adapter with the glass element. Lens was used wide open at f/4.5 and ISO was 200. Camera/lens combination were mounted on a tripod.






Today. Same camera, same lens. I removed the glass element from the FD-EOS adapter and moved in closer to my subject. Without the corrective glass element, maximum focusing distance with this lens is about 20 meters, which isn't so bad. Lens set wide open to f/4.5, ISO 800. Camera/lens combination were hand-held.




I removed some noise and added a bit of USM in Canon's DPP to the raw files. After converting the files to .tif, I bumped up the contrast very slightly using PS5's 'curves' function. Then I downsized the files and converted them to jpg for viewing here at the forum.

I'm seeing possibly a bit of purple fringing on the second and third photos and some very slight green and magenta fringing on the bottom two. Easy enough to eliminate with a bit of post processing.

One thing I'm enjoying very much about this lens is that, when it is wide open, it displays decent sharpness and chromatic aberrations are reasonably well controlled. And WO is my preferred method of use so I can blow out the background hopefully to reasonably smooth looking bokeh. In the above images, however, the bokeh is rather busy looking, which I guess is to be expected since the background is grass and leaves.


PostPosted: Wed Apr 27, 2011 6:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
Nicely done. ANd good exposure on the dove in the tree Smile


PostPosted: Wed Apr 27, 2011 7:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
Nice samples, I love the squirrel shots Wink
Regards,
Jes,


PostPosted: Wed Apr 27, 2011 3:43 pm    Post subject: Re: Squirrels and Doves -- Canon FD 400mm f/4.5 Reply with quote
Doesn't look shabby. Contrast is pretty good and the sharpness seems to be there, just not very evident in these samples.

cooltouch wrote:
I removed some noise and added a bit of USM in Canon's DPP to the raw files. After converting the files to .tif, I bumped up the contrast very slightly using PS5's 'curves' function. Then I downsized the files and converted them to jpg for viewing here at the forum.


Note that if you reduce luminance noise with DPP, you will lose a lot of sharpness. Fine detail really gets obliterated, even at the lowest setting. Chrominance NR is ok.

Also, in case you want your shots to look sharp at web size, you'll have to sharpen AFTER resizing. Tons of detail will come out that got blurred due to resizing. I'd recommend smart sharpen, "more accurate" enabled, and a very small radius, 0.1-0.3. When you use 0.1 you can use a low strength (30-50) and even repeat it 2 or 3 times. You can sharpen a duplicate layer and use a layer mask to fix oversharpening artifacts.

Just some advice; you can do with it whatever you like.


PostPosted: Wed Apr 27, 2011 9:16 pm    Post subject: Re: Squirrels and Doves -- Canon FD 400mm f/4.5 Reply with quote
AhamB wrote:

Note that if you reduce luminance noise with DPP, you will lose a lot of sharpness. Fine detail really gets obliterated, even at the lowest setting. Chrominance NR is ok.


Yes, I'm very aware of this. I almost never push the luminance noise reduction past two steps, for this reason.

Quote:

Also, in case you want your shots to look sharp at web size, you'll have to sharpen AFTER resizing. Tons of detail will come out that got blurred due to resizing. I'd recommend smart sharpen, "more accurate" enabled, and a very small radius, 0.1-0.3. When you use 0.1 you can use a low strength (30-50) and even repeat it 2 or 3 times. You can sharpen a duplicate layer and use a layer mask to fix oversharpening artifacts.


This is also something that I will frequently do, but it requires a gentle touch depending on the subject. For example if the subject has prominent diagonal lines, even a small boost in sharpness will cause the "stair-step jaggedies" to appear.

I haven't played around much yet with PS's smart sharpen -- I'm still coming up the learning curve with PS in general. But I'll give your advice a try, see how it looks on images sized for display on the web.


PostPosted: Wed Apr 27, 2011 9:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
Many thanks for sharing samples, it looks like a very decent lens indeed Very Happy Really like the second squirrel shot! I have to say though, the lens looks to produce sharper results without the glass element. 20 metres should be enough for most wildlife I would have thought?


PostPosted: Wed Apr 27, 2011 9:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
I dunno about most, but for around here, 20 meters is usually plenty.


PostPosted: Thu Apr 28, 2011 6:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
2nd squirrel shot look quite good lens-wise, but I do like the 1st couple of dove pics.


PostPosted: Thu Apr 28, 2011 2:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
What I like about the first set of photos -- the squirrel and dove on the ground -- is the lens did a decent job of giving me a 3-D effect. I agree it could have been sharper, but it was "good enough" for viewing on the web. A 100% view will reveal the lack of sharpness. Similar with the dove in the tree shot. Sharpness was good, despite its being hand-held, but I had bumped the ISO up to 800, which on my DSLR is guaranteed to give you an unacceptable level of noise. But at the size I've used, the noise isn't visible.


This lens uses rear drop-in filters for the various effects. Which nowadays are impossible to find. Fortunately, it came with a regular, clear, 1x filter. I say "fortunately" because I'm pretty sure that its design requires that element to be in the light path for best image results.

When I first bought it, I popped out the filter and gave it a cursory examination. It looked fine, so I hadn't given it a closer look until yesterday. Yesterday I was outdoors in strong sunlight, and when I removed the filter it looked almost opaque from a sort of film that had coated it. So I thoroughly cleaned it and put it back it.

Now I'm assuming that this might be the reason for some of the softness that we were seeing earlier. And I was quite interested in seeing if I could confirm any differences. But there were no doves or squirrels around to cooperate, so all I could do was take pics of our roses . . . again, and a tree trunk that had some good bark detail. At least they're different roses. We had a pretty strong wind blowing too, so I used a flash to try and freeze the action with the roses waving around.

The camera was mounted on a tripod. ISO was 400. I used the FD-EOS adapter without the corrective glass.




It seems obvious to me that, by cleaning the drop-in filter, I should have improved sharpness and reduced softness. The above two images look pretty good, I think, despite their being shot at ISO 400, but it's hard to say without comparing them to known images that I've taken before. And the only ones that I can reliably point to are the shots of the water kiosk, so it looks like I'll be shooting it again. Confused

I did a fair amount of PP on the rose, and almost none on the tree trunk. The rose's background was very grainy looking to begin with. Then I used PS's Smart Sharpen filter, which made the graininess even more pronounced. So I used PS's Reduce Noise filter and that eliminated most of the grain, but I had to dial almost all the sharpness out of the image. Cool So much for the Smart Sharpening, I guess. With the tree trunk I gave it just the slightest amount of curves adjustment and smart sharpening. Barely enough to notice. For some reason, there was very little noise, despite the shot being taken at ISO 400. Which has gotten me to wonder if digital is similar to film to this extent: does a digital image show more grain in underexposed areas of a photograph? I know film does, and it appears that digital might as well. Or at least Canon's version of digital.


PostPosted: Fri Apr 29, 2011 5:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
cooltouch wrote:
The rose's background was very grainy looking to begin with. Then I used PS's Smart Sharpen filter, which made the graininess even more pronounced. So I used PS's Reduce Noise filter and that eliminated most of the grain, but I had to dial almost all the sharpness out of the image. Cool So much for the Smart Sharpening, I guess.

This is why I mentioned sharpening a duplicate layer and then using a layer mask to mask the areas you don't want to sharpen. You won't want to sharpen the bokeh because it will accentuate the grain and you can paint black (with the layer mask selected) on areas where you start to see stairsteps/jaggies and halos. I see some halos in your pics so perhaps you used too big a radius for sharpening?

About a digital image showing more grain in underexposed areas: they definitely do this. There are far fewer levels (of photon counts) in the lower stops captured by the sensor, so the quantization becomes visible and the noise has a much bigger impact. You may want to look up the "expose to the right" (ETTR) technique. It's a method to make sure you always capture the maximum amount of image data, minimizing noise. I've been using it ever since I found out about it.


PostPosted: Fri Apr 29, 2011 6:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
Hey Aham, I don't usually deal with layers when I do pp to an image, but the more I read on the subject of more refined sharpening techniques the more I read about using layers, so I guess I'll have to start using these techniques.

Okay, when you explain things in terms of photons, this makes sense. Faint shadow detail isn't so much noisy as it is simply lacking in sufficient photon counts.

I first read about exposing to the right probably a year ago and I agree with it, but it should be noted that the ETR technique is a slight exposure shift to the right. Otherwise one can run the risk or losing detail because of washout. Can't say that I've been consciously trying for this, but it certainly would explain why the background in the image of the tree trunk has little if any noise compared to the background for the roses, come to think of it.


PostPosted: Sat Apr 30, 2011 4:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
cooltouch wrote:
I first read about exposing to the right probably a year ago and I agree with it, but it should be noted that the ETR technique is a slight exposure shift to the right. Otherwise one can run the risk or losing detail because of washout.

I don't know what you mean by washout. Unless you're using an uncoated lens, you can overexpose as much as you want, up to the point that the highlights aren't clipping. Just pull down the exposure in RAW and you'll have maximum detail in all parts of the image, not washout -- in my experience anyway. What would the reason for the image getting washed out be? It's true that things like flare can get slightly worse with longer exposure times, but those are exceptions IMO.

Btw, using layer masks is really easy. Just create a duplicate layer, select it, sharpen it according to taste. Then add a layer mask (the button with the rectangle with the circle in it), select it, and paint black with paintbrush or other tool on the areas that you want to mask. The unsharpened layer below will show through in the masked areas. That's it. You can save it as a PSD in case you may want to revisit the image with different pp, or you can just use save for web and discard the PSD (or TIFF if you used DPP to export).


PostPosted: Sat Apr 30, 2011 5:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
AhamB wrote:
cooltouch wrote:
I first read about exposing to the right probably a year ago and I agree with it, but it should be noted that the ETR technique is a slight exposure shift to the right. Otherwise one can run the risk or losing detail because of washout.

I don't know what you mean by washout. Unless you're using an uncoated lens, you can overexpose as much as you want, up to the point that the highlights aren't clipping. Just pull down the exposure in RAW and you'll have maximum detail in all parts of the image, not washout -- in my experience anyway.

My apologies for not using a more correct term. By washout, I mean clipping. White with no detail, where my camera's screen blinks alternate black and white in those areas.

AhamB wrote:
Btw, using layer masks is really easy. Just create a duplicate layer, select it, sharpen it according to taste. Then add a layer mask (the button with the rectangle with the circle in it), select it, and paint black with paintbrush or other tool on the areas that you want to mask. The unsharpened layer below will show through in the masked areas. That's it. You can save it as a PSD in case you may want to revisit the image with different pp, or you can just use save for web and discard the PSD (or TIFF if you used DPP to export).

Okay it sounds to me like you're doing selective sharpening. Yeah, the way you describe it, it definitely sounds simple enough.


PostPosted: Tue May 03, 2011 10:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
cooltouch wrote:
My apologies for not using a more correct term. By washout, I mean clipping. White with no detail, where my camera's screen blinks alternate black and white in those areas.

Of course I also avoid clipping like the plague, but you can't really use the camera display to judge if there's actual clipping in the RAW file. The clipping warning that the camera shows is based on the jpeg preview with the chosen camera profile with its and contrast/saturation settings, and also the chosen white balance. It's best to use the "neutral" profile; the other profiles like "standard" or "landscape" apply a much steeper tonecurve because of which the histogram and the clipping warning doesn't show how much headroom for the highlights the RAW file really has. Even when you use the neutral profile and you see the histogram is clipped a bit, you'll usually be able to recover it simply by pulling back the exposure a bit.

Anyway, I'd say: try it out. IMO it's much costlier to underexpose than it is to overexpose, with most DSLR's. The Leica M9 does the opposite: it has very little highlight headroom but you can pull up the shadows a lot without any noise or loss of detail. It's important to know these things in order to get the best result out of your camera.


PostPosted: Tue May 03, 2011 3:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
I'll give "Neutral" a try, but I don't like the idea that it has sharpness turned down to "0". This most likely means that I'll have to apply some sort of sharpening filter to every image I take, whereas I don't have to do that now, with it set to "Standard."

Where do you get your information on the tonecurves of the various settings? My manual doesn't discuss it.


PostPosted: Wed May 04, 2011 5:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
cooltouch wrote:
I'll give "Neutral" a try, but I don't like the idea that it has sharpness turned down to "0". This most likely means that I'll have to apply some sort of sharpening filter to every image I take, whereas I don't have to do that now, with it set to "Standard."

Where do you get your information on the tonecurves of the various settings? My manual doesn't discuss it.

You can edit the sharpness and other parameters of each of the camera profiles on the camera. Just set sharpness to the value you like (I use 3).

When you switch between the standard and neutral profile in DPP, you can see how it affects the histogram. The standard profile is way more contrasty, so the histogram gets stretched. There are more differences than just contrast though. It's impossible to match the different profiles just by playing with the contrast and saturation sliders.
Anyway, the purpose of using Neutral is just to make the camera histogram give a more accurate representation of what is captured in the RAW file.
Post new topic   Reply to topic
Home   Manual Focus Lenses
Page 1 of 1