Hello Jorge, Joanna and William,

Jorge; good to see you on list, I trust all is more peaceful at home?

Sorry, back to topic:

I agree with Jorge, that in the situation that Joanna is describing I
would be inclined to stick with a fixed daylight balance on the 1Ds, ( I
never use Auto since the arrival of CaptureOne). Presumably the film
crew are working on daylight film? If they use tungsten, then of course
stick with a tungsten balance. 

It may be worth profiling the camera? I have just invested in some
custom profiles for my 1Ds ( http://www.etcetera.cc/) for US$20, which
are a big improvement over the profiles included in CaptureOne, Soon I
intend to get the camera itself profiled, which I think will help even
more.

The 1Ds, in common with most DSLRs (except I believe the Fuji S3) is
prone to blown highlights, so why not work in spot metering mode and
constantly meter from the highlights with the camera set in manual mode?
I don't mean lights, but the brightest area of tone in the image. In
keeping with film, set the max area that you want detail in to + 2 1/3
stops and let the shadows sort themselves. The 1Ds can easily be setup
to flash the highlights on the display, but personally I would watch and
trust the histogram.

I have never experimented with custom curves, but I know that it is
quite staightforward to setup custom curves on the 1D / 1Ds. Canon CPS
(www.cps.canon-europe.com) should be able to help you with the tech side
of that. Alternatively and probably more simply, CaptureOne allows you
to work with curves for the RAW file and thes can be saved and re-used
or applied to multiple images in a batch. This would be my preferred way
of working. I feel that detial can endlessly be recovered from shadows
on RAW files and by exposing for highlights, you should do away with
most of your problems.

I say most, because at the end of the day, neg film has a dynamic range
(without pre-flashing) of 16 stops. The best digital backs do 12
stops....William may be right, but there is no harm in trying again.

One final thought. By exposing for the highlights, you should move away
from most of the light halo problems. Perhaps you can use C1 to output 2
versions of each image (light and dark) and use one the the shareware
pluggins to combine the 2 images to give the maximum dynamic range?
(sorry do not know names)

One warning! Beware the highlight / shadow tool in Photoshop CS! For
minor work it is excellent, but the price one has to pay in terms of
image quality for more substantial correction can be very high. I have
spent many hours experimenting with it, but I use it very sparingly for
production work.

Best,

Nick.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

Nick Wilcox-Brown 

A member of the Association of Photographers
W: www.NickWB.com
   


> 
> > william.curwen wrote

>Jorge Parra wrote

> Why not just set camera balance to daylight and work your way through?
> 
> Alternatively you may just need to shoot a grey card in each different
> lighting in full frame as to build your own collection of 
> white balances so
> you can play with them during the RAW conversion. > 
> Jorge Parra

===============================================================
GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE

Reply via email to