A list member emailed me offlist. I thought it best to forward my thoughts to the list.
Hold off on spending too much right now on CF cards. They are improving rapidly in size and speed, and dropping in price quickly. 512 meg CF cards are a pretty good deal. I bought Capture One LE for less than a hundred bucks and I love this program. I rarely do anything in Photoshop, but those keepers i get I do like to play with them a bit. Overall, most stuff does not need Photoshop. I have some early JPGs that I almost weep when I see them. A couple of really wonderful images are garbage because I don't have the RAW originals. I figured a small CF card would do me until I learned things, so I shot JPG for a very short time - big mistake. Even just doing some quick and easy Capture One settings, you can get lots more highlight and shadow in images. But, once you learn more - things like linear conversion and curves can bring out even more. Of course this is all depending on exposure. I found out two important things to always remember for exposure: 1- if your highlights are important, you must underexpose most evaluative readings. For example, if I have a white Egret in the photo, I drop down a half stop, full stop in bright sunlight. 2- if you don't have important white highlights, you must give a full exposure, creating a histogram extending almost but not quite to the right side. This is because the non linear nature of the sensor's recorded values makes the right side of the histogram hold much more information. If you are short of info there, you end up stretching your tonal range and getting noise. More to come. -- Need a brighter headlight the safe way? Get a MOTORCYCLE HEADLIGHT RELAY KIT at: http://jimdavis.oberro.com/html/bike_acc_.html I'm a BMW rider and enthusiast. * **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************
