On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 6:21 PM, Charles Robinson <charl...@visi.com> wrote:
> On May 22, 2013, at 09:37 , Ciprian Dorin Craciun <ciprian.crac...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> I've been struggling twice so far to obtain the so called "UniWB"
>> on a Pentax K-30, but without any "real" success so far.
>
> I'm sorry that I don't have any help for you on this other than to ask: why?
>
> It sounds like you are going through a lot of work and calculations to
> accomplish.. what, exactly?
I guess Matthew Hunt perfectly described the "why" behind the
UniWB technique.
Now off-topic a little bit to describe my personal context in all this:
* I perfectly understand that what makes the difference between a
"good" and "ordinary" photo is mainly composition (and to a less
extent the hardware and technicalities, although they can help a lot);
* I am quite new to shooting RAW (for example only now I've found
about ETTR and UniWB), although I'm not quite new to amateur digital
photography; (I've had a small bridge since 2006 which also had RAW,
but the "manual" settings were quite difficult to tweak;)
* because I do photography only as a hobby, I have the time to
fiddle with the camera and then "develop" the resulting RAW's;
Otherwise I perfectly agree with you that for "average" shooting
what I'm trying to do is an overkill, and most likely could lead to
bad results. (I'm also pretty certain that until I completely
understand how all these techniques work and get some practice, my
shots will be well "sub-ordinary".)
On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 7:06 PM, Charles Robinson <charl...@visi.com> wrote:
> On May 22, 2013, at 10:52 , Matthew Hunt <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>> UniWB, as I understand it, is an effort to find a set of camera
>> settings (white balance, etc.) that makes the displayed histogram come
>> as close as possible to this ideal.
>
> Ugh - sounds like a lot of work.
:) Well it is... I've already lost about two days without a
concrete result...
> For the K30 (and K5), there is so much exposure latitude that if you're
> really worried about oversaturation, just "underexpose" by a stop.. or two..
> or three.. and bring the levels up to what you'd like to see in post. Job
> done!
The "underexposure" is exactly the problem: in most cases although
the JPEG (or the embedded JPEG in the RAW that we see the histogram
for) is overexposed, the actual RAW data is under exposed, to the
point that almost 25% of the histogram contains nothing.
That is why on the contrary, when shooting RAW, it is recommended
to overexpose the picture by 1-3 stops. The only problem is to know
how much? (Because the histogram is pointless now.)
> Otherwise it seems to me like so much fussing and stressing to "get the right
> histogram" that you've forgotten that the reason you have a camera is to take
> photos.
:) Yup. I agree.
However picture this, when shooting RAW it's just like shooting
without a histogram: you don't know what you get until you open the
files on the computer.
Ciprian.
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