[6BQ5]

I want my images to turn out in the way as I see the scene with my eyes. When I first got my K-30 about a month ago I used it in Auto mode and I found my colors were too vibrant or the contrast was way off. Exposures were based on far away backgrounds that were too bright. Etc etc. I soon discovered TAv mode after reading the manual and fell in love with it! Coupled with exposure compensation my shots came out better. I felt like I had more control of the frame and the light being recorded. There were still times when the shot comes out with the wrong shadows or faces come out dark. Sometimes details get washed out too. Then someone on the forum here posted how they don't use JPG. They only record in DNG because then the image data you record is pure. What you see on the computer screen is exactly what the sensor sees. I switched to shooting in DNG and I started using the supplied Silkypix software to open my images.

A lot of times DNG files on my computer look way different than the JPG files I was used to. I don't know what my K-30 did during the conversion process but it must have been pretty massive. Sometimes the DNG file comes out perfect! The "perfect" DNG feels way better than the "perfect" JPG and I think I will continue with the DNG format.

This got me wondering about what the camera does to the image data. I want to be more successful with my photos but I think I have no idea what the sensor sees and what it does with the data. All of my shots are done with the viewfinder. I don't use the LCD screen for shots. When I use it for previewing the images it seems to amplify the data so that even dark pictures or poorly composed pictures look decent.

How do I get what would feel like more control over my image data? Am I just destined to shoot in DNG and post process a bit? Should I just click away as long as I don't saturate/starve the sensor since DNG files can be fixed up? Post processing feels like I am moving away from photography and more toward digital studio manipulation?

Thanks!!

[jatrax]

Post processing feels like I am moving away from photography and more toward digital studio manipulation?

Post processing is part of the process. If you are not prepared to sit at the computer and finish the 'developing' of your images then you should shoot in jpeg. Pentax offers a very good set of tools in camera to setup how you want the jpeg to be 'cooked'.

When you shoot DNG you have to do the same on the computer, set up how you want the computer to 'cook' the jpeg.

In film days, you used filters or different film stock to get a particular look, and then finished it off in the darkroom or print lab to make it come out the way you wanted. Not the average snap shots of course but professional level. Now everyone has the tools to add professional level development to their images. But just because you have the tools doesn't mean you need to use them. If you are happy with jpeg from the camera that is fine. I know several people who make a living at photography that only shoot jpeg.

Should I just click away as long as I don't saturate/starve the sensor since DNG files can be fixed up?

Of course not! Your goal is get it right in the camera, always. Many of my DNG's get little or post processing beyond the default preset I use on import.

Am I just destined to shoot in DNG and post process a bit?

If you shoot DNG, you MUST process the file. The camera does that for you when you shoot jpeg, if you shoot DNG then you have to do it. The simplest way is to set up presets in your software so that all images get processed on import to the default look you want. Then you can adjust the ones you really want to work on or the ones you missed the exposure.

[boriscleto]

Post processing has always been a part of photography. Ansel Adams did say that the negative is the composer's score and the print is the performance...

He also said dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes god made in tonal relationships...

[mikeSF]

I may be veering slightly off your main topic, but IMO, an image without processing is an incomplete image. Nobody says you have to overdo it, but if you embrace a few basic processing tools, you may be more flexible in making the corrections/enhancements you want to see.

[stevebrot]

Translating the image in the mind's eye into the final image for display is a major issue for all photographers. Unfortunately, good as current tools are, there a limits as to what the camera can do for you and there is even a strong case for adopting a "less is more" approach.

Here is my short list of suggestions:

1. Go shooting frequently
2. Don't be afraid to shoot subjects outside your normal choices
3. Exhaust the subject...literally explore every possible angle
4. Limit your choice of lenses, initially and broaden the scope of arrows in your quiver as you learn your needs.
5. PP (post-processing) is your friend. With good software, you can duplicate all that was previously done in the darkroom and a whole lot more. None of my shots go directly from the camera to Flickr...NONE!
6. Shoot in RAW/DNG whenever possible to retain as much data for PP as is available to the camera
7. Learn about light and exposure. Some of this comes from experience, some from books. With experience you will see that after the subject, the quality of light is everything.
8. Be prepared to throw 99 out of 100 shots into the trash bin. Your keeper ratio will improve with time.
9. Learn about perspective (position of the camera) as an element in composition
10. Learn about selective focus
11. Learn the fine points of manual focus. Warning: May lead to purchase of aftermarket focus screen and potential addiction to purchase of vintage manual focus lenses.
12. Learn the fine points of exposure. No, the meter is not always right. When you learn how the metering system comes up with the magic numbers, you are in a better position to see how you can do a better job.
13. Learn the limitations of your camera. With practice, these can be leveraged to your advantage.
14. Again...shoot a lot.

[dms]

First what you see is a complex combination of the eye-roving over the scene, the sounds and smells heighten your response, etc. You can capture the sense of what you see by changing the image--but how to is up to you. (That is what photography as the art form often strives to do.)
That brings a second point--think about what you want to do--and then compare how it worked (to your remembered picture). After a while it may become more intuitive. BTW looking at the camera display will not replace looking at the computer screen--and then printing (as often a computer screen image will not print well (backlight vs. reflected light). Good luck.
How to books are (IMO) can give you technical help (I recall forty years ago one book stressing to use tungsten film and filtering it for dayligh was the most important lesson I ever received to improve travel pictures), but to create art: great photo's and great paintings inform more. As an example the Camera Work (Stieglitz's chosen photo's from his magazine of same name) inform more about composition than all the books on "rule thirds" an so forth.

[rbefly]

I want my images to turn out in the way as I see the scene with my eyes.

Good luck with that, Boris. The human eye is a wonderful organ and unrivaled for complex features. We look at a scene and re-focus (without conscious effort) on faraway details, wider, closer, darker, brighter, you get the idea.
Now, imagine teaching yourself to use a tool that does many of these tasks, but has mechanical and optical settings, different adjustments for EVERYTHING the eye does, and at best, won't do all of them in the same frame.
All anyone can do is learn (through practice, reading and research, then more practice) to use the tool, the limits of the device as well as the merits.
Part of the system is post processing. It's not the devil some make it out to be, quite the contrary; It is the second phase of the image-creating.
Ideally, a scene is so perfectly balanced in light, color, brightness + shadow, saturation, contrast, hue, texture, detail, composition, subject placement, balance, rendering and many other factors, that we need no PP. How many times out of 1,000 shots do you think that happens? Once, if you're lucky.
So, we download and correct what nature and luck failed to provide.
You will learn to treasure those few captures that need little processing. In the meantime, give nature (and the limitations of the photographic process) a hand.
Also remember, if you shoot in RAW, you can always convert it to jpeg. If you shoot in jpeg, you're stuck with jpeg.
JMO,
Ron

[Anvh]

And that is why you process your photos, you can make them into the image you saw instead of what the sensor saw.

I mostly shoot differently then most others here, when you know the limits and qquircks of the sensor a bit you can actually expose in such a way to "gather" the most information from a scene.
This way you have more freedom afterwards when you process the photo.

So my photos mostly look rubish without any editing, does that make me a poor photographer?

[interested_observer]

Morning Boris,

You can think of JPG as destructive and RAW/DNG as non-destructive. Having the camera save in JPG you loose a lot of the original data and thus unable to go backwards from the JPG. That is the big reason for RAW/DNG. Pentax actually cooks (out of the standard setup) their JPGs less than the other brands. The most important reason for RW/DNG is the wide variations in light, shadowing, coloration, texture, just everything concerned with capturing the image, that the camera really does not know how to make the adjustments "perfect" under all conditions. They go for the most common conditions that they think that the "average" or typical photographer will encounter.

With RAW/DNG, you can start out with the raw sensor data, and then adjust to where it matches what you thought you saw in yur mind's eye.

[JimJohnson]

How do I get what would feel like more control over my image data?

Boris:
(re)read pages 139 - 159 and 168 - 172 of your K-30 manual.


You have a lot of control over how your camera's built-in jpeg engine processes the RAW image and creates a jpeg file. That is, so long as you stay away from both AUTO and SCN modes. In AUTO and SCN modes, you are telling the camera to use its own RAW to jpeg algorithms.

For the non-AUTO and non-SCN exposure modes you can select from the following pre-built color schemes: Bright, Natural, Portrait, Landscape, Vibrant, Radiant, Muted, Bleach Bypass, Reversal Film, Monochrome, Cross Processing ....or.... using one of the preceding color schemes as a starting point, create your own custom scheme and save it.

Personally, I am one of those who prefer to use a PC based RAW to jpeg engine simply because there is no way to cram the processing power and flexibility of my computer inside the camera - but that doesn't mean I won't use my camera's jpeg engine at need.

[nomadkng]

don't forget, what we see is in 3 dimensions, what the camera captures is in 2.

that is possibly the trickiest thing to account for. understanding how a 3d world is translated into a 2d image. it's complicated by lens choice and aperture etc.

that's where the trial and error comes in. the more you shoot, the more you'll start to see the world as your camera sees it

then learn how you see the world as well, ie I see the world around 24mm (All are APS-C focal lengths since that's the Pentax sensor size), but I can envision the scene as wide as 10mm (I can even visualize the lens distortion since I've used this lens enough) or as narrow as 55mm when composing my images.

a final note about PP, not only can you develop the image into what you saw, sometimes you can develop the image into what you WISH you had seen, such as that brilliant sunset that SHOULD have happened but the light didn't cooperate despite all other elements being in place...lol

some of my best selling photography has actually been "fake" if you will, colors that weren't actually there, but could have been, creating a mood that WAS there but the camera couldn't capture.

its why photography is still considered an art form despite all the attempts by some to reduce it to physics and math...lol

[6BQ5]

Thanks to everyone for their replies!

Yes, I do remember "the good old days" when I processed my B&W film and prints in my garage. That was one of the ways my Dad introduced me to photography when I was a kid. I remember playing with all the contrast filters, exposure timings, chemical concentrations, etc. When I think back to it I suppose it's not a stretch of the imagination to consider all that work as the equivalent of today's post-processing. Being young and naive back then I always looked at that as compensation for imperfections in the film, the paper, the temperatures, etc. Naturally, I was perfect and the need for compensation and adjustment had nothing to do with me!

Working with B&W processing felt very physical to me. There was something to set, something to screw in, something to pick up and put down, etc. Today's post-processing just doesn't have the same physical interaction and maybe that's where I need to changing my mindset. I'm doing the same things as I would have before but I do it with a mouse instead of a pair of tongs. It's like I need to relearn everything!

I really like stevebrot's list. Item 8 is a bit of stretch for me, even after years with a P&S camera. Photography always felt "expensive". I never created a tornado of "click-click-click-click-click!". There was a lot of "Hmmm...." instead. In today's digital world it's easy to go nuts with the shutter and there's no better example than my mother in law. She holds her Nikon DSLR like a video camera. I can't even begin to guess what her shutter count must be! For her pictures are "cheap". Maybe I'm too stingy with my shutter. I consider 12-20 pictures on one outing to be huge! I've made more but I feel kind of silly about it when I look at the size of my folder!

Item 12 on that list was a surprise for me to learn. There seems to be a range where the K-30 is right on and anything outside that range results in over/under exposed. I find this to be true of wide open (f/2-ish on down) and stopped down (f/8 on up).

JimJohnson: I took a glance through the pages you listed and I remember thumbing through them before. Hmmm... I think I understand what the camera offers internally but that's more than I want to funnel into it through the buttons and interface. At that point I would definitely have to surrender to my mouse! It's a good reference though.

nomadkng: I understand your last line and I'm not trying to sterilize photography into numbers and math. Actually, I'm trying to be on the other end of that and it's proving to be quite a challenge. I want to recreate the same emotional response I had when I originally took the picture! As you and rbefly said, I took the picture with my eyes - both of them! - and then I flatten that image onto the sensor. Now instead of working with my mind's perception of depth I am working with a digital system's rendition of color and shading. Tough, tough, tough!

[JimJohnson]

Working with B&W processing felt very physical to me. I think I understand what the camera offers internally but that's more than I want to funnel into it through the buttons and interface. At that point I would definitely have to surrender to my mouse! It's a good reference though.

I thoroughly understand. It pained me to sell my entire B&W darkroom for a fraction of its original cost. Each step in the darkroom was planned and deliberate. But I don't miss the time I spent setting up and cleaning up after each session. My wife doesn't at all miss not being able to march right up to me to ask or tell me something. She only made THAT mistake once when she flipped on all the basement lights to open the door and find her way down the stairs!

The closest I come to using my camera's internal jpeg processing tools is to occasionaly use one of the various presets. For me jpegs are only for quick review for composition, or when I am taking a 'record shot' (as opposed to making an image).

And if I am going to process my images outside the camera, I actually find RAW files are faster and easier to work with than jpegs. I have LR4 and won't bother upgrading because I don't like the enforced workflow. I understand the workflow rationale, and I'm not saying its bad; it's just not me. I have settled on Photoshop Elements 11. It has the same ACR tool as LR and I can do most of my tweaking there before moving into PSE. If I ask myself WHY I would perform a specific physical action in the darkroom, doing that same action in ACR/PSE comes fairly easily. It becomes easier with practice, just like it did in your darkroom. And you know, in addition to setup and cleanup, it used to take a lot more time than it takes to do the same things on the PC - and in color to boot. Since I am using an Adobe product, I shoot DNG and I have also switched my camera's color space to Adobe. I make only one switch to sRGB color space at the end of post-processing. It seems to work and it certainly simplifies things.

I'll offer one last tidbit. Invest in a hardware based monitor calibration tool. Getting even mediocre results is tough if your monitor isn't calibrated. And getting prints that remotely resemble what you see on an uncalibrated monitor is impossible. Don't bother with software-only calibration tools. Your brain will trip you up every time doing the equivalent of its own AWB and auto-ISO. We are so used to seeing TVs that are way too blue, and looking at PC monitors that are factory calibrated to make PowerPoint primary-color pie charts really POP!, that it is nearly impossible for your brain to get the settings right using only software.

Everyone hold up their hand if photos often look on the verge of overexposed on your monitor, but prints of those photos tend to look dark and muddy.

[Lowell Goudge]

Why can't you photograph what you see? You are missing the Mindread.exe application in your camera

It is virtually impossible to photograph what you see, because your brain is doing a whole lot more than the camera ever did in processing images. Lets start by the fact that when you view a scene, you see it in small sections and your mind interprets this as you look around. Add to this the fact that your eyes have much wider exposure latitude than a camera sensor, and you simply have the ability to see a whole lot more detail. Then to top it all off, you have the brains ability to look past visual obstructions and noise , filtering out things that are distracting, but which exist in reality.

S go back to the start, forget photographing what you see, learn to see what your camera and lens see. It is much easier. Take one lens/focal length, and go out and shoot with it. Look at the perspective, etc, learn what is important for each lens or focal length. Play with viewing angles and position. Once you start to think about concepts like this, and thinking how a specific subject will look when shot a certain way, you will have much better shots..


As for JPEG and exposure issues, don't get drawn into the JPEG vs raw debate. Learn about exposure properly, read a oak on it. Learn to interpret the scene in terms of the dynamic range of the sensor. Set exposure for the scene based upon what you want to be viewed as properly exposed. Learn to use spot metering, and evaluate the scene.

JPEG itself is not bad, it is just that it requires you to think a little more about the shot in advance, specifically in terms of setting things like saturation, color temperature, contrast etc. learn how to use JPEG settings to your advantage, even if you shoot raw, because even if you shoot raw, most editors will displays/import images using the default JPEG settings, so your final PP, if you elect to do any, is greatly reduced.

[Clavius]

"No great artists ever sees things as they really are. If he did, then he would cease to be an artist." - Oscar Wilde

I take photo's of things that I like. Most of the time I can't even remember what the scene looked like when I import and start editing my raw files. I just process them untill I like what I see again.