On Jul 6, 2006, at 12:14 PM, Toralf Lund wrote: > Yes and no. You (or was that someone else?) were also talking about > understanding the limitations of the equipment, and when you want > to do > that, you should always try to see the full picture.
I'm sorry, but there's a difference between trying to understand the behavior of the equipment and arguing over things that are pointless in significance. I'm not trying to design a camera or second-guess the engineers who sweated over this one. I'm trying to make high- quality photographs and, here, help others use the equipment to make photographs. Wasting time on this as some sort of engineering/ technical debate doesn't make photographs. > doesn't the fact that the signal is (potentially) amplified after > it leaves the > sensor, but before it enters the A/D converter, mean that you can do a > little bit about it in one sense? No. > I also think it can be proved that > your method will not give better results than certain others (like > using > the old good old 18% grey) at higher ISO settings. But it will never > give worse results than other methods, either, so there you have it... You can use any methodology you want as long as it resolves to the same thing, which is exactly what you are proposing above. You can place your Zone IX values anywhere you want by metering for Zone V and placing exposure if you understand the meter's calibration curve with respect to the sensor. In point of fact, this is how I do metering in practice because the meter is calibrated with a Zone V reference as a baseline. Understanding how the sensor reports the exposure and how the numerics work allows me to place the exposure properly for Zone IX and obtain the greatest possible amount of data for processing. > I also think it would be interesting to use a strategy > of not changing the setting at all, but just shoot at the native ISO - > and correct everything in software, for a while, though. Maybe I ought > to try it myself, except that I would then have to get a DSLR first... Experiment for yourself as I have. I have been working with digital image processing since 1983 and digital capture since the middle 1990s. Debating behaviors on the basis of the technology is pointless if you don't even have a camera to determine how it works in practice. Extending ISO by manipulating the RAW data alone will not do as well as exposing properly at a higher ISO setting. That's a statement of fact drawn from evidence gathered by empirical means. So there's more to it than you think ... and I don't pretend to understand all the intricacies, nor are they worth wasting my time on. I didn't design the sensor and A/D system and am not trying to design one; I work with the data this one produces. I don't need to understand the component behaviors separately because there's no adjustability of one without also affecting the other in the camera's control capabilities. Godfrey -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
