[LRflex] Black Level Comparisons
- From: David Young <telyt@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: leicareflex@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 09 Jun 2007 10:21:00 -0700
All:
This started out as a private mail, to Xavier. But I though about
it, and felt that [a] there was nothing private in it, and [b] others
might find this comparison interesting.
Yesterday, on one of the few decent days we've had, recently, I
headed to Tunkwa Lake, in pursuit of the elusive "White Grebe". So
far he (she?) has not been seen, this year, so I had to content
myself with a few ducks and the Red Winged Black Birds.
The males were very skittish, but a few of the females landed within
'reach' of the 400 Telyt.
As I was processing the shots, this morning, I realized that the day
was overcast, though warm, and this led to some exceptionally flat
light. Increasing the contrast would darken the darks, but also
lighten the light bits ... blowing the highlights. I could, of
course, always fiddle with the curves, in Photoshop, which allows you
to fiddle with the range more carefully, but it's fiddly. So I
turned to my favourite program, SilkyPix, and simply used the black
level slider, during "development".
For those of you who are not familiar with Silkypix, it is a Japanese
written RAW image processor, which is relatively inexpensive yet
powerful and simple to use. It's Black Level slider simply darkens
the dark bits, without touching the lighter bits at all... sort of
the lower half of a contrast control.
On shot of a female Red Winged Blackbird just cried out for this treatment.
http://www3.telus.net/~telyt/RWB-BLComp.htm shows both before and
after, with two, otherwise identical, versions of the same shot.
I think the slight loss of detail on the underside of the tail
feathers is a worthwhile tradeoff for a much more effective shot.
Comments, anyone? Or am I alone in this perception?
Cheers!
---
David Young,
Logan Lake, CANADA
Wildlife Photographs: http://www.telyt.com/
Personal Web-pages: http://www3.telus.net/~telyt
Stock Photography at: http://tinyurl.com/2amll4
------
Unsubscribe or change to/from Digest Mode at:
http://www3.telus.net/~telyt/lrflex.htm
Archives are at:
//www.freelists.org/archives/leicareflex/
Other related posts:
