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04-29-2009, 04:06 AM   #1
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Can it be done? YES. Is it practical? NO

Hello,

You may have seen elsewhere in this great forum my posts about my old Samyang 60-300 lens that produces images with horrible contrast. I found that the pictures can be tweaked in Photoshop to the point of saving some.
Well, I recently went to an airshow. With the crowds and distances to the performing aircraft, my kit's lens was not much help. So I took a leap of faith: Use the crappy almost useless telephoto, shoot in raw, shoot like a maniac and hope some can be saved.
Back home I started the painful post-process. At the end, the workflow was to use Pentax Photo lab to crunch the luminosity levels (shadows/highlights) to stretch the histogram, apply noise reduction, tweak white balance in some cases, saving as highest quality JPG and turning over Photoshop for fine tuning, cropping etc. The process was far from optimized but at the end, I was surprised I was able to save many pictures.
But this took anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes per picture, adding up to almost 2 weeks. So bottom line, yes it can be done, but is far from practical. That's why I'm in the market for a better lens.
But it was a good exercise nonetheless.

Here is a link to my album with the pictures:
http://public.fotki.com/tatocorvette/puerto-rico-airshow-2009/

Here are some samples:

As a reference, here is how it looked like to my son's point and shoot with no zoom:


Here are some of mine after pushing it beyond the wildest dreams of the lens designer
raw image


my tweaked version:






The album has 150+ pictures. Not exactly PPG material, but I'm happy.

Thanks,

04-29-2009, 09:54 AM   #2
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Those do look good, but whether or not it was worth the effort only you can say. I would point out that almost any other program could have saved you a *ton* of work by allowing youto simply copy the settings used for one file to the rest, thus giving you a much better starting point for further tweaking.
04-29-2009, 10:29 AM   #3
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QuoteOriginally posted by Marc Sabatella Quote
Those do look good, but whether or not it was worth the effort only you can say. I would point out that almost any other program could have saved you a *ton* of work by allowing youto simply copy the settings used for one file to the rest, thus giving you a much better starting point for further tweaking.
I looked at it and thought about how I would have handled it in ACR (process all with a global setting based on a median image file).
04-29-2009, 10:41 AM   #4
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You do realize you can batch process in PPL, right? I do it all the time.

Just making sure.

04-29-2009, 10:59 AM   #5
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QuoteOriginally posted by silvershoes Quote
You do realize you can batch process in PPL, right? I do it all the time.
This is true, but batch operations in PPL are all-or-nothing - you cannot batch apply some settings than go in and tweak further, because with PPL, "processing" and "conversion" are inseparable. True, you could could probably save a settings file manually and then manually reload it for every image you want to tweak, but the difference in convenience between that and how other RAW processing programs work - where you can batch apply the settings without doing a conversion then go visit a file and find those settings already made for you without having to manually load a settings file every time - is like night and day. To reference the thread title, "can it be done? yes. is it practical? not to nearly the extent it is with other programs".

But it is true, in any case, that the OP could have saved some trouble by taking advantage of the features PPL does provide.
04-29-2009, 11:07 AM   #6
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QuoteOriginally posted by silvershoes Quote
You do realize you can batch process in PPL, right? I do it all the time.

Just making sure.
I would rather poke out my eyes with dull hot forks than use that software - just sayin...(this may have been a slight exaggeration )
04-29-2009, 12:13 PM   #7
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Thanks for the replies!
I'm still learning and I appreciate all your inputs.
I'm still a newbie in all this, so definitely not an optimized process. PPL may not the best to start with either. I did try some batch processing but was not very succesful. As Marc points out, in PPL processing and conversion are tied together. I started by batch converting the 200 or so raw images into JPG samples to check and discard out of focus and overexposures. (Keep in mind this was a manual aperture / manual focus lens and the darn airplanes moved really fast ) After that, I processed several raw files to see if I could get some common parameters for all but they were so different one to another. Histograms were all over the place. I also tried batch processing all images into highest quality JPG and tried to use Photoshop only (simply because I have a bit more experience with it) but the extended range of the raw file made it worth the effort of doing the levels/curves and noise reduction before the conversion. I think some images could have not be saved without this.

Thanks,

04-29-2009, 12:18 PM   #8
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QuoteOriginally posted by Marc Sabatella Quote
This is true, but batch operations in PPL are all-or-nothing - you cannot batch apply some settings than go in and tweak further, because with PPL, "processing" and "conversion" are inseparable.
True, although I've never been one to insist that all processing be done during RAW conversion.

I batch process for the big things - color temperature, contrast, etc. - and do any necessary tweaks in PS in LAB mode. (I have an action that converts to LAB and adds an empty curves layer.) It's no muss, no fuss, and the file remains endlessly editable. Plus it allows me to drag a curves layer from one file to the next painlessly. (The empty curves layer can go or stay; it's neutral.) It's also a lot easier to drag a layer than to copy a settings file.

It's very fast, very easy, and quite frankly I like the output from PPL better than I do from ACR. Other actions take the file from LAB to a predetermined size in RGB for web or printing and can be run in batch. Only then do I do the final sharpening depending on what the photo needs.

I realize it's not for everyone, but it's both flexible and fast when whomping through hundreds of images and it leaves you a working file you can go back to later without fear of mucking up some settings. Ymmv.
04-29-2009, 12:28 PM   #9
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QuoteOriginally posted by silvershoes Quote
True, although I've never been one to insist that all processing be done during RAW conversion.

I batch process for the big things - color temperature, contrast, etc. - and do any necessary tweaks in PS in LAB mode. (I have an action that converts to LAB and adds an empty curves layer.) It's no muss, no fuss, and the file remains endlessly editable. Plus it allows me to drag a curves layer from one file to the next painlessly. (The empty curves layer can go or stay; it's neutral.) It's also a lot easier to drag a layer than to copy a settings file.

It's very fast, very easy, and quite frankly I like the output from PPL better than I do from ACR. Other actions take the file from LAB to a predetermined size in RGB for web or printing and can be run in batch. Only then do I do the final sharpening depending on what the photo needs.

I realize it's not for everyone, but it's both flexible and fast when whomping through hundreds of images and it leaves you a working file you can go back to later without fear of mucking up some settings. Ymmv.

OK I admit I lost you there. What is this LAB mode? Your process sounds like fast and easy.
04-29-2009, 01:17 PM   #10
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QuoteOriginally posted by ismaelg Quote
OK I admit I lost you there. What is this LAB mode? Your process sounds like fast and easy.
L*A*B (it isn't called Lab It's L. A. B.)

L is the lightness component
A is the green-red
B is the blue yellow

You can switch between lab and rgb without loss however going to cmyk causes a color degradation.
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