09-01-2017, 11:22 PM
Have fun with <ROFL>ing 
We were talking about how much F-stops are nice to have - you two kept sticking to the "more than 12 is useless, learn to expose, whimps"-theory. Others were saying, 14.8 could save your ass sometimes - not always.
The article is about color depth... ^_^ which somehow is related to dynamic range like everything in this world is related to every other thing. Basically I read the author saying if you get more DR, let the highlights clip at the same point as with 12 stops DR, but get less noisy shadows and midtones. An acceptable decision - but not the only right one. As always, it depends. To be honest, being spoilt with a huge DR of the current camera (and the next as well) I'm no expert in this kind of exposure tricks. So far, I got my shots the way I liked it.
Out of interest: I googled a bit but could not find a way to tell by checking the histogram, how much DR the actual RAW needs to start at left and end at right border of the histogram window. When I tried to verify what 14.8 shops mean, I had to lift exposure and shadows. Apparently the exposure slider shows f-stops, but what are +100% shadows? Anyway, +4 stops from an underexposed to the correct exposed sample are no problem. An overexposed picture with -4 is more a problem, because a lot bright tones are then already clipped. Personally, I don't agree with overexposing and lateron lower exposure - I see the sensor closer to positive than to negativ film.
As for the 14 vs 12 bit thing: Forgive me, but I'm not a big fan of "everything set on manual and long dives in the menus before taking one picture"- I like to keep complicated things simple, otherwise I would not need to employ a fat CPU doing all the needed steps for me.
I'd save 9 MB by going from 14 to 12 bit. 40 MB to 49 MB - sounds much, but deleting every 5th pictures saves the same disk space - and how could I know in advance which color depth would be sufficient for a certain picture? And bigger color depth is good, no?
Well... with two quick and dirty comparisons, pulling up shadows and dulling down highlights, for both exactly the same values I have to say, the bigger color depth gets more colourful noise
So, here I will change settings for this kind of available light shots.
The next comparison was a bit more curious - if there's actually a bit of improvement (less visible color noise, less disk space) what would happen if I take these shot with ISO 64? Long story short: I don't know. First I didn't see anything, then thought "yes, you're looking at a 8 bit JPG preview. Render it as 16 bit TIF!" Did so, just to find again no difference I would feel comfortable to call it a difference. The I thought again "Yes and what is the color depth of Mac OS? In short - no 14 bit at all, not even 10 bit/channel" At least with my Late 2010 iMac. The new big one with Retina display finally got a more professional color depth.
So, I ask for patience until I made top my mind to go and throw a couple of grands after Apple and get an iMac Pro once it surfaces in webshops, but so far the differences in color depth became visible at high ISO and not in favor for the bigger color depth. It was more colors, yes, but I would try to get rid of them by using the noise>color slider.
I learnt something new (to me, but obvious, now as I think about) However, it still better to have a bigger DR - because I don't only take pictures at "most of the time 12 bits / f-stops are enough)
We were talking about how much F-stops are nice to have - you two kept sticking to the "more than 12 is useless, learn to expose, whimps"-theory. Others were saying, 14.8 could save your ass sometimes - not always.
The article is about color depth... ^_^ which somehow is related to dynamic range like everything in this world is related to every other thing. Basically I read the author saying if you get more DR, let the highlights clip at the same point as with 12 stops DR, but get less noisy shadows and midtones. An acceptable decision - but not the only right one. As always, it depends. To be honest, being spoilt with a huge DR of the current camera (and the next as well) I'm no expert in this kind of exposure tricks. So far, I got my shots the way I liked it.
Out of interest: I googled a bit but could not find a way to tell by checking the histogram, how much DR the actual RAW needs to start at left and end at right border of the histogram window. When I tried to verify what 14.8 shops mean, I had to lift exposure and shadows. Apparently the exposure slider shows f-stops, but what are +100% shadows? Anyway, +4 stops from an underexposed to the correct exposed sample are no problem. An overexposed picture with -4 is more a problem, because a lot bright tones are then already clipped. Personally, I don't agree with overexposing and lateron lower exposure - I see the sensor closer to positive than to negativ film.
As for the 14 vs 12 bit thing: Forgive me, but I'm not a big fan of "everything set on manual and long dives in the menus before taking one picture"- I like to keep complicated things simple, otherwise I would not need to employ a fat CPU doing all the needed steps for me.
I'd save 9 MB by going from 14 to 12 bit. 40 MB to 49 MB - sounds much, but deleting every 5th pictures saves the same disk space - and how could I know in advance which color depth would be sufficient for a certain picture? And bigger color depth is good, no?
Well... with two quick and dirty comparisons, pulling up shadows and dulling down highlights, for both exactly the same values I have to say, the bigger color depth gets more colourful noise
So, here I will change settings for this kind of available light shots.The next comparison was a bit more curious - if there's actually a bit of improvement (less visible color noise, less disk space) what would happen if I take these shot with ISO 64? Long story short: I don't know. First I didn't see anything, then thought "yes, you're looking at a 8 bit JPG preview. Render it as 16 bit TIF!" Did so, just to find again no difference I would feel comfortable to call it a difference. The I thought again "Yes and what is the color depth of Mac OS? In short - no 14 bit at all, not even 10 bit/channel" At least with my Late 2010 iMac. The new big one with Retina display finally got a more professional color depth.
So, I ask for patience until I made top my mind to go and throw a couple of grands after Apple and get an iMac Pro once it surfaces in webshops, but so far the differences in color depth became visible at high ISO and not in favor for the bigger color depth. It was more colors, yes, but I would try to get rid of them by using the noise>color slider.
I learnt something new (to me, but obvious, now as I think about) However, it still better to have a bigger DR - because I don't only take pictures at "most of the time 12 bits / f-stops are enough)