A Digiscoping Dilemma

My present ‘standard’ digiscoping set up with the Leica apo-Televid 77 is: a B32 WW eyepiece on the scope and a Digilux 1-Televid adapter connected via a 49-46 stepping ring to a Panasonic Lumix LX5 camera. To fill the frame and minimise vignetting with this set-up the camera has to be on maximum zoom (19 mm). This gives me a 35 mm full-frame camera equivalent focal length of 2675 mm. I use an attachment made by Richard Franiec that fits into accessory shoe of the camera and allows a standard cable release to be used to press the shutter button.

Panasonic Lumix LX5 with Digilux 1 adapter
stepping ring attached to 32 WW eyepiece on
apo-Televid 77

However, the LX5, introduced in 2010, does not take full HD video and the whole set-up with so many glass surfaces is inclined to flare. Travelling abroad means having to carry another camera, charger and the Digilux/stepping ring adapter. For most distant shots my superzoom Nikon bridge camera (1000 mm full-frame equivalent) is fine. It is only for the really distant shots that the digiscope offers an advantage.

I have been trying the Phone Skope system for digiscoping with my iPhone 6 to see if that would be a better bet for carrying when travelling. The dedicated phone case (only just available in UK from Newpro) and special adapter for the Leica 32 WW eyepiece work very well. The video from the iPhone 6 with its Sony sensor is of high quality and, of course, full HD. The disadvantage of the set-up is the maximum effective focal length that can be obtained: 960 mm and effectively the same as my Nikon superzoom camera. (For incorporating stills into full HD video, I do of course, have the option of only using 1920 x 1080 of 3264 x 2448 pixels of the i-Phone image, thereby gaining extra magnification by what is a ‘digital zoom’.) However, I can see occasions where I shall use the Phone Skope set-up. If the scope and tripod are locked on a bird then it is a matter of moments to attach the Phone Skope, and start the video or take a still using a remote release or the volume control on the ear-phones.

iPhone 6 in Phone Skope case and adapter for 32 WW eyepiece

Without my Lumix LX5 set-up I would lose the capability to go beyond 1000 mm full-frame equivalent focal length. Should I get a new superzoom camera with an even greater maximum focal length which could take raw stills and full HD video, and ditch the LX5 and Digilux adapter, its lack of hull HD now being a major disadvantage? The gain in optical quality and greater depth-of-field might offset that loss of focal length that my present digiscoping set-up can achieve. For travelling abroad that might be the best bet, with the iPhone (which goes abroad with me anyway) and very light Phone Skope to latch onto the Televid if necessary.

Decisions have to me made…

Photograph Taken: Then What?

The photographic press appears to have deserted output. By output I mean the means by which a photograph is displayed and viewed. It is clear that very few photographs are printed, hence the lack of real information on printers in the photographic magazines. But then there is a blank. Just what is the best device for viewing a photograph? A Mac with retina display? A tablet, if so which one? A television, if so what sort of television?

A key element apart from definition is dynamic range. There is a good tutorial on dynamic range, together with information on cameras, scanners  and output devices, from Cambridge in Colour here. My understanding is that televisions were restricted by what was possible on a cathode ray tube. But how do present-day and emerging technologies compare? What improvements are on the way? And do they match the output from the best of still and video cameras?

Output for all the magazines appears to stop with Lightroom. Shouldn't they be providing us with this sort of information by including output to replace some of the endless reviews of cameras introduced with tiny changes from the last model? Oh, but then camera sellers, on whom they rely for advertising income, do not usually sell output devices like televisions and tablets.

Advanced Photographer Magazine

Of all the editors of photographic magazines published in Britain, William Cheung has long been my favourite. He made a very good job of Practical Photography (now sadly dumbed down) in the early days and with Advanced Photographer he has reached 51 issues which at one per month is something over four years.

In the difficult world of amateur photographic magazines, Advanced Photographer is noted for being non-luddite (Amateur Photographer judging by the letters section is the home of both, and perhaps only, the rank beginner and the entrenched luddite) but along with all the magazines it really cannot get to grips with video at a time when all the creative advances are occurring with moving pictures. Filling a monthly magazine (let alone the weekly Amateur Photographer) must be very difficult, but Will Cheung has done a pretty good job over the four years. Yes, there has been an overemphasis on studio lighting which is of no interest to me but overall it is a better read than the numerous magazines in the crowded market. Again, achieving that cannot be easy on what must be a relatively small budget.

Canon PowerShot SX60 HS for Birding?

Lots of birders use the Canon SX50 superzoom bridge camera. However, its replacement, the SX60 is not getting a good reception from birders (who want the long focal length) or the amateur photographic press which doesn't have a clue what birders or other wildlife photographers want a superzoom bridge camera for. The 1365 mm focal length, in 35 mm terms, is tempting since it is length that birders crave. One of the problems is that noise is evident at low ISO settings and that the resolution is relatively low. More pixels have been crammed on the small sensor, (although the sensor is now a CMOS type) so it is not surprising there are problems with noise. Users have reported problems with the image stabiliser and very slow focusing in poor light at longer focal lengths.

All these problems are inherent in the design of bridge cameras aimed at a price band in the camera market but so far I have not been able to find a real comparison with the available competition as models come and go at a great rate. Judging from the birders' comments online though, the Canon SX60 is getting the thumbs down on both performance and price.

I still don't know what I would replace by Nikon P510 with. In superzoom terms it is getting long in the tooth and I suspect that another Nikon or perhaps Panasonic would be in the running if I were forced to choose.

ColorMunki Display Software. What a Hassle

I bought a ColorMunki Display from WEX the other week. What a hassle it was to install the software on my iMac. As expected, the software on the cd would not install. Even finding the download version for Yosemite was not easy (the website was out of date and referred to Mavericks being new). After installation, the software did not recognise the usb-connected device and this together with the other problems that arose in trying to get the thing to work were only found by searching the Xrite website. All it needed was a proper set of instructions from the outset with a flow diagram showing what to do if such and such happened. What should have been a simple job turned into a 90-minute saga of trials, complete reboots, crashes, more looking up etc. Xrite are clearly not Xright. They need to get a grip of their software, their updates and their website. Eventually I got the thing installed, and by leaning the iMac back as far it would would go, I got a profile; an excellent final result but what a hassle—a back-to-the-1980s installation job.

I still have not been able to register the device with the manufacturer. The option to do so is greyed out in the software and via the website there is no way of knowing what the code is for the software. Impasse.

I wonder if a Datacolor Spyder might have been a better buy.

Infrared photography with a point-and-shoot Panasonic Lumix DMC-FH27

On trying digital infrared photography for the first time I bought on eBay a simple IR-converted point-and-shoot camera, a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FH27. In some ways it was an easy and fairly cheap means of seeing what was possible. For example, custom white balance is very easy to set. I found a lens hotspot at the wide end (5 mm) of the zoom but that disappeared at longer focal lengths). The biggest problem is noise. Within the sky or clouds, there is very marked noise even at the lowest ISO settings. In fact, the noise is so bad that attempts to change the hue of a particular colour chosen by the eye-dropper tool often failed and all efforts to apply colour control points in Nik software failed miserably. Moreover, the colour rendition of foliage was not what I had expected.

I should, of course, have read the Kolari Vision website before I bought it. This is what it says:

Most Panasonic cameras take photos with a more saturated, distinctive blue color. Their flash tends to mess up the custom white balance, and some high resolution sensors can have a distinct noise pattern. Another thing to note with these cameras is that the 590nm and 665nm filters tend to come out stranger, with the leaves being more red than yellow, and skies becoming somewhat green.

I then moved on to IR-converted DSLRs and my FH27 has been put aside with the hope it would fit in my pocket when shooting video or normal photographs so that I did not have to carry several heavy camera bodies.

A couple of weeks ago I it caught my eye and I wondered if I could find some way of overcoming the processing problems I had encountered earlier. I thought I would try, as a first step, to reduce the noise. This I did using Nik’s Dfine 2 (Aperture plug-in), first applying the basic, global adjustment and then using control points to either increase or decrease the noise (the latter when I wanted to retain detail). Then, I returned to Aperture and took the image to Photoshop Elements/Elements+ to swap the red and blue channels. I also added a hue/saturation adjustment layer to shift the overall hue as necessary. Then back to Aperture and Viveza 2 where I hoped I would be able to use control points as well as global levels and curves adjustment. I could and was, therefore, able to process images to achieve the ‘look’ I wanted, using the full panoply of controls available. A return to Aperture and then a visit to Sharpener Pro 3 where I applied only sharpening to control points where I wanted to see crisper detail. Global sharpening was not applied in order to retain the noise reduction I had obtained at the first step.

Screen grab from the loupe in Dfine 2 showing before
and after global noise reduction

That is the workflow or standard protocol I am applying to the jpgs from the FH27 (no raws on this camera alas).

Some of the older websites describing infrared techniques I found did suggest that for some small cameras noise reduction might be necessary to satisfy those photographers who did not think noise added to the atmosphere of infrared images. They suggested Neat Image, for example, which I have used to good effect for scanned prints on textured paper (post 22 December 2013). However, noise reduction software that offers local control rather than a simple global coverage is of a great advantage for the present application. Dfine 2, offers local control points and colour ranges to obtain selective noise reduction. By using Dfine 2 for the first step, I have been able, after that, to follow my standard workflow used for images from my Nikon DSLRs (16 October 2014).

A before and after sky area from a processed image showing the noise reduction

So would I recommend the FH27 as an infrared-converted camera? I cannot say that I would. A converted Nikon D70 or D80 body can be bought for not that much more and the small sensor with a large number of pixels (the pixel density of the Lumix is 24x that of the Nikon D80) is probably just too small to get really good low-noise IR photographs. Exposing at the red-end of the spectrum exacerbates noise for the reasons explained here. However, I am now able to say that shots can be processed to get much better results than might be expected from my early efforts and the amount of noise generated.

A colour version of a test image manipulated using control points in Viveza 2

A black-and-white conversion of the same image in Silver Efex Pro

The jpg produced by the camera

A quick shot between showers last weekend with white balance set on grass in sunlight a few seconds before

I could not make local adjustments with this level of noise

After global and local adjustments in Define 2, Viveza 2 and Sharpener Pro 3
The enlarged images of noise before and after shown above are from these images
Ignore the subject (I didn't want to get wet getting something more photogenic and the manipulation achieved. This is just to show the sort of effect I can now get from an almost infinite range of global and local adjustments

Infrared Colour Conversion: A Workflow in the Mac using Aperture, Photoshop Elements plus Elements+, and Nik Software

As followers of this blog may realise, I have been playing with infra-red converted cameras over the past year. I have been trying to achieve a protocol or workflow that includes the channel mixer step to swap the red and blue channels as well as to provide local as well as local control over what appears in the final image.

Over the past few weeks, urged on by the acquisition via eBay of a 590 nm cut-off filter in a Nikon D80, I came up with the following protocol. Last year I bought a 715 nm-converted D70. The 590 nm is the ‘Super Color’ filter of Lifepixel; the 715 nm is the ‘Standard IR Filter’. Incidentally, for those wanting to get into colour infra-red photography, the videos on the  Lifepixel website are the best I have come across.

The protocol is not perfect because it does not move the original raw files between applications and the channel swapping is done at 8 bits, not 16.

The starting point is a raw NEF file in Aperture 3. This workflow uses Aperture to store and stack the converted images. However, since Aperture will not be supported by Apple in the foreseeable future, it is important to note that no essential steps are taken in Aperture.

In Aperture Preferences, export files are set to PSD with Photoshop Elements as the External Editor (TIFFs could also be used). Nik Collection’s Viveza 2 and Sharpener Pro 3 Output Sharpening are plug-ins from Aperture.

I am not giving details of what I do within each piece of software. Topics like channel-swapping and how to use Nik software control points are very well covered elsewhere.

The raw file is imported into Aperture. This is what it looks like:

No Adjustments are made to the image in Aperture. Using ‘edit with Adobe Photoshop Elements.’ the image then opens in Photoshop Elements with Elements+ incorporated. That’s where the red and blue channels are swapped. After saving and replacing the image that arrived in Elements, the channel-swapped image arrives back in Aperture alongside and in the stack of the original version. This is what it looks like at that stage:

Then, using ‘edit with plug-in’, the image is opened in Viveza 2. There, the world is your oyster because the level of control is immense. I first do global adjustments using mainly the Levels and Curves panel. I then make control points to control the colour, saturation, brightness and contrast  of individual areas. For example, I can make the foliage colour more golden (from the 590 nm filter) or I can desaturate it completely to white. Nik’s U-point technology really comes into its own for sort sort of work. I then press Save and the image reappears in Aperture.

In Aperture I using the retouching tool to take out any minor imperfections. A bird, for example, in the distance may look like a black speck.

The I sharpen the image, either in Aperture or in Sharpener Pro 3 Output Sharpening, accessed again as a plug-in. Sharpening the whole image can bring unwanted texture into the sky, for example. However, control points can be set to then reduce that added sharpening in the sky. Indeed, the sky can be de-sharpened independently so far that the image can be made to appear as if a long exposure was used with the edges of the clouds merged into the sky. After pressing Save, the image again appears back in Aperture.

Finally, I straighten and crop the image if necessary in Aperture.

This is what the output can looked out, bearing in mind that a very wide range of ‘looks’ is possible from a basic infra-red end of the spectrum image.

So that, for the moment at least and until I come up with something better, is my standard protocol.