[wim]

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. To be honest, being spoilt with a huge DR of the 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.

 

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) 

 



 

Well, as mentioned, I do have enough with 12 stops of DR (actually 8 to 10 will do nicely most of the time ). As mentioned too, if I need more, I just create an HDR stack, and so far I never had a need to shoot more than a stack of 3 . Of course, that will only work with static subjects.

 

Even so, you'd be amazed what can be achieved with 10 stops of DR and a bit of PP .

 

Kind regards, Wim

[JJ_SO]

Thank you, I'm already amazed what can be done in PP with more than 14 stops. And I would miss them very much while you have no idea at all how much easier photographer's life can be with more - even if not often needed - but if it's needed, then there's even more rarely an alternative to it.

 

As you correctly mentioned, stacks are only working for static objects. Happy highlight clipping. 

[miro]

I still don’t understand the canon strategy. They build an underspec FF camera that struggle to hold on with their APS-C. At the same time they don’t take the APS-C lens line seriously.

https://fstoppers.com/originals/canon-6d...iew-193200

[Brightcolours]

Miro, it is ok to drop the silly hyperbole. The 6D mk II has pretty fine specs, really. While it is unknown why Canon does not give it a 5D mk IV like sensor, it is a non issue anyway. 

 

And that everybody is repeating the same nonsense about "focus point spread", does not make it not nonsense. Every FF DSLR camera has a limited point spread, and the cameras that do offer a little bit significantly wider spread have a bigger camera body with more room for a bigger AF module on the bottom of the mirror box. Bad for Canon to offer a smaller body? This is just silly stuff.