Can you see any difference between these two ?

BADGER.BRAD

BADGER.BRAD

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Hello all,

On one of the evenings this week I went out for the first time in a long time with my Camera to a local(ish) church ( St Kinelms nr Halesowen) and took some photos while we wondered around, On the way back we past Ufmoor Wood and I thought I would take my dogs there just to see if it was of any interest. On the second trip I took my little compact £9 eBay Kodak and at the end of the dog walk decided to have another look at the Church and took a few photos which were roughly the same as the original photos I had took with the Sony. At this point I must point out that I am not too keen on the Sony as it's much bigger than the other camera and I am always worried about damaging it ( it cost slightly more than £9) plus I'm not over impressed with it's photo quality compared to other cameras I have used. In fairness to the Sony I get so little time to play cameras that I have forgotten how to use all of it's features and how to access them. Have a look at these too images , although they were taken at different times of day conditions on both were very overcast and the location is in very deep shadow due to a number of Yew trees in the church yard. Without a doubt the Sony is technically the better camera but every time I use it I feel let down and every time I use the crappy Kodak 9mp I am quite impressed. Have a look and see if you can see any real difference ?

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100_4567.JPG
 
A couple more, oddly the top image appears better on my software than it does on TP , There is a level of blown highlights on the tree edges but not as bad as shown here. The Sony seems to perform better but is it £300 better than a Compact of today ( the Kodak is 12 years old).

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At relatively tiny screen resolution, a compact is likely to seem as good as a "better" camera and will generally (if the exposure's correct) have better retrievable detail in shadows and highlights.

You seem to hate the Sony for some reason - get shot of it!
 
If you are happy with the cheap compact, then that's all that maters, surely.
Is it better than the Sony... No, but if you can't see the difference then who cares.
 
I don't hate the Sony I'm just not impressed by it and feel I've let myself for buying it, when I originally brought it I was hoping that the Dynamic range may be somewhere near a film camera ,it wasn't ! This had always been the one thing that let my cheap digital s down and I was expecting a dramatic improvement generally. Today I decided to try and photography a few birds that I feed on a round paving slab in the garden I managed to get the remote app working and waited for 30 mins or so for the birds to turn up ( I think they were a little bit upset by the tripod and camera) when they did wifi from the camera to the phone dropped out and I lost the lot. I was only about 10 feet or so from the camera in Mrs Badgers summerhouse meanwhile I still had wifi from the house at 4 to 5 times the distance and through a few walls . A lot of the features sound great in theory but are not so great in practice. I think you may have a point about the relatively small screen size that I am viewing on later I will try looking at them on my TV screen .
 
One thing about DR that I think is possibly true of digital is that you can pull quite a bit from the shadows, maybe more than with film? I may be wrong there, but once the highlights are blown with digital that's it. Having said that I do find that quite a bit can be pulled back from apparently blown highlights post capture by acting on the blown bits alone either with a digital ND or selectively altering the exposure with an exposure brush.

I used to expose to the right and correct post capture but I believe that with more modern and more ISO invariant cameras exposing to the right isn't quite the big thing it was with older tech.

I do find that these days with digital blown highlights aren't anywhere near the issue they were with film, for me. YMMV.

Anyway Brad. I'm sorry you're not getting what you want from the kit.
 
The dynamic range of the Sony will be much better, but you’ll probably need to either use in camera HDR (if it has it) or shoot raw (I’m assuming you’re not, apologies if you are) and bring back shadow and highlight detail in post processing. If fidding on a computer isn’t for you (no shame in that, a lot of people don’t like it) then stick with the £9 Kodak, as you’ve posted before about your disappointment with the Sony. No point making life harder for yourself than you need to.

Straight out of camera JPEG’s won’t differ much between cameras at first glance - it’s only when you start to pixel peep do you notice sharpness and the level of detail that’s been resolved. But it’s only really in post processing that you start to bring out saturation, contrast, highlight and shadow detail etc. And that’s no different to the dark room in film photography.
 
Probably my basic software but here are two photos at as the camera wants to expose and 1 stop under where the preview shows no blow highlights ( they are jpegs) in the one stop under the clouds are great but as I increase the shadows to a level to view the shadows it begins to blow the high lights ,the other as you can see the clouds are totally blown out from the start. both were taken with a manual lens but I seem to get the same sort of results from the standard lens. shame I didn't try the compact.


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You say you increase the shadows but it blows the highlights so I assume you're raising the exposure of the whole picture. What you need to do is boost the shadows without affecting the highlights.

Manual or AF lens shouldn't make a difference.
 
BADGER.BRAD said:
Probably my basic software but here are two photos at as the camera wants to expose and 1 stop under where the preview shows no blow highlights ( they are jpegs) in the one stop under the clouds are great but as I increase the shadows to a level to view the shadows it begins to blow the high lights ,the other as you can see the clouds are totally blown out from the start. both were taken with a manual lens but I seem to get the same sort of results from the standard lens. shame I didn't try the compact.


View attachment 282885View attachment 282883
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I think any camera on the market would have given a very similar result, assuming they were all set to the same metering mode, and weren't using in-camera HDR. As Alan says, you need to adjust the shadows and highlights separately, although you don't say which software you are using. I'd be surprised if your Kodak compact could have recovered that much highlight detail if you'd taken the same shot with it, and even if it had it would have been very noisy.

I'm pretty sure that your camera will have in-camera HDR, it will allow you to expose scenes like this in a more realistic manner but it will have limitations in very high contrast scenes obviously.
 
I mainly use a program called Shotwell and occasionally Gimp ( I use Linux) but ideally would prefer to get it right in camera as photography for me is not about sitting in front of a PC.
I find by looking at the blinkies on the rear screen I can make sure I'm not over exposing the highlights but then find I cannot drag the shadows up enough. The software does allow me to do both separately. With film ( and this is not a film vs digital argument) I used the sunny 16 rule to calculate exposure and then deliberately over expose by 1 or 2 stops knowing I could still over expose by a few more stops without any problems, but I find with this camera I'm having to under expose by 2 stops or so to avoid blown highlights and then have problems pulling the shadows up enough. it just has no where near the DR I was hoping for. How far would you expect to be able to pull the shadows up from ?
 
BADGER.BRAD said:
How far would you expect to be able to pull the shadows up from ?
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That depends on how much noise is present, how much of it can be removed and how much it bothers you at the size you intend to view the picture. As a rule the lower the ISO the more you can recover shadows.
 
If you are playing with JPGs then you won't have enough bit data in the file to properly lift the shadows. And as @Ed Sutton says the lower the ISO the more chance of recovery you have, but the you cannot recover the black cat in the coal hole!!

Here is an example of just using the shadow recovery slider in Lightroom (admitdly with a camera with very good dynamic range) but it proves the principle.

SeqFNkUh.jpg


ovkH7erh.jpg


I do have a similar comparison on an APS-C camera (same sized sensor as yours), if you are interested, I'll dig it out.
 
Thats quite a recovery I think my software may need some improvement, If I try that it gets to a point where it starts to blow the highlights before I've fully recovered the shadow. They are .jpegs so that may also be part of the problem I just need to find myself a simple Linux raw editor !
 
BADGER.BRAD said:
Thats quite a recovery I think my software may need some improvement, If I try that it gets to a point where it starts to blow the highlights before I've fully recovered the shadow. They are .jpegs so that may also be part of the problem I just need to find myself a simple Linux raw editor !
Click to expand...

You have to work with the RAWs, I'm not a Linux person, but this may help https://itsfoss.com/raw-image-tools-linux/
 
BADGER.BRAD said:
Thats quite a recovery I think my software may need some improvement, If I try that it gets to a point where it starts to blow the highlights before I've fully recovered the shadow. They are .jpegs so that may also be part of the problem I just need to find myself a simple Linux raw editor !
Click to expand...

You definitely need to shoot on RAW to get the best options for post processing.
A jpeg is 8 bit, which means it has 256 possible different 'levels' for each of the 3 colour channels.
RAW will be at least 12 bit (or more depending on the camera) - which is 4095 possible 'levels' for each of the 3 colour channels
It's this extra degree of information in the file which allows you do do so much more.
 
I don't know which distro you're running, but if you don't mind having a few KDE dependencies installed the try DigiKam as a friendly image processor. Dark Table and Raw Therapee are also purpose-made raw editors, but slightly less friendly, although IIRC they can both be used as plugins for GIMP.
 
I seem to remember you posting a while ago being underwhelmed by the Sony and it’s apparent lack of DR, it’s a shame you’ve still not gelled with it.

However, to repeat what everyone else has said to get the best of of digital photos, or should I say to be able to manipulate digital photos to their maximum potential you need to shoot in raw, understand the software to get the maximum detail, and then expose your photo based on how you plan on processing it.

If you’re not prepared to do this, or at least use HDR techniques I don’t think you’re ever going to get the results you want I’m afraid.
 
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