On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 9:38 PM, Larry Colen <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Aug 19, 2012, at 6:07 PM, Bruce Walker wrote: > >> Hey, a Blue Man Group cover band! :-) >> >> That looks like a challenge. I'm game. How about posting a .dng on DropBox? > > I made a small lightroom catalog with the raw files (.pef) and posted it in a > hidden directory on red4est.com > > If you want to give it a try, ping me, and I'll email you the url. > > The .pefs are still uploading, and will take quite a while, I expect.
Larry, I've had a chance to play with one PEF (8698.PEF) and here's what I found. The extreme contrast between levels in the RGB channels appears to freak out Lr. A few functions don't work like they should at all (eg using the eye-dropper to detect points in the tone curve: total fail). It also freaks out the Noise Reduction algorithms so they botch the image by posterizing it. But I got a decent, albeit grainy, b&w rendition. Try this: Start with all controls at their Lr defaults. Your detail-over-smoothing problem is solved by reducing the "Detail: Noise Reduction: Color" to zero (it defaults to 25). Do that first. Lens Corrections: Enable Profile Corrections: on HSL/Color/B&W: Black&White Mix: - 1st set all sliders to -100 - set Blue to +88 - set Purple to about -63 (adjust to balance shadows and noise) Tone Curve: Lights: -40, Darks: +40 Basic: Shadows: +69 The image should look pretty good now. No noise reduction at all, so it's quite grainy. If I was going to do a really proper job, I'd set all the Lr controls to their defaults, set Color NR to zero, then send the the image to Photoshop to edit. There I'd extract the blue channel and chuck the others (copy-all in the B channel in Channels, then paste to a new layer). After that play with curves and apply some NR with a plugin. Or else, after extracting the Blue channel in Ps, just save the image back to Lr and use the Luminance NR and tone curves there. Set the Detail slider up to 80 or so when raising the NR. Cheers! -- -bmw -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
