[BruceBanner]

So... I own a K-1 and am aware of the Pixel Shift feature and use it a fair bit myself, however up until now I have used it solely with motion correction off and with the K-1 mounted on a tripod (obviously with IS off and more often than not a 2 sec timer as well).

Of late I have seen a couple of pictures on flickr with a few different people taking hand held pixel shifted images, either landscape or perhaps of someone sitting on a bench. I know from my own use when snapping insects, even a 1-2 second exposure can mean the entire shot takes 4-8 seconds to complete so you're hoping the insect won't move during that time, so I noticed from the EXIF of some of these hand held pixel shifted shots the shutter speed is increased to 1/1600 for example and the ISO upped to 400 to compensate for correct exposure.

It got me thinking... is there a trade off when using pixel shifting vs the end results of a 'regular normal' shot whereby shutter speed and ISO perhaps are lower?
I had a quick go at hand held pixel shifting in my garden earlier, and it felt like that even when i raise shutter speed substantially the 4 shots still take the same time...
Example; I could set the shutter speed to 1/1600 or 1/250, and the complete process (not counting the actual 'stitching and processing image part at the end')
still felt the same.

I know from my own experience of using the HDR feature hand held, the results are less than stella. I much prefer bracketing and processing off camera, and one step further.. to use a tripod in that process as well.

I just have serious doubts about hand holding the K-1 for pixel shifting... prove me wrong!

No.. but in all seriousness, has there been a more indepth comparison of hand held pixel shifting vs regular shooting and whereby the trade off occurs? If you start having to go above ISO 800 for example, is the extra noise vs the extra sharpness not worth it? Is this all subjective?

Cheers,

Bruce

[Keith23]

It is an interesting idea which I have never thought of doing. I think I will try. The light here is generally bright, so I could get good speeds for landscape shots.

[biz-engineer]

is there a trade off when using pixel shifting vs the end results of a 'regular normal' shot whereby shutter speed and ISO perhaps are lower?

The interval between each of the 4 pixel shifted frames is approx. 1/4th of a second. That means, even if the shutter speed and ISO are increased, motion blur is still very likely to happens because of the time delay between frames.
Now, for non moving subjects, I've found that PS yield the best results with lowest possible ISO and shutter speeds set at 1/4th of a sec. because a faster than 1/4th sec. wouldn't make the 4 frames taken much faster, and longer than 1/4th sec. would likely make PS more prone to motion artifacts. That said, you can still use PS in RAW, with OVF and take only one frame when converting to JPEG, it's like having an all electronic shutter while still using an OVF, which means, depending on shutter speed, sharper picture thanks to lack for mirror induced vibration and lack of shutter shock. However, all electronic shutter means that subject motion should still be rather limited not to get any rolling shutter effect. You can try different things and see how results compare.

[microlight]

I tried hand-holding some pixel shift pictures with the K-3II, and got no improvement over a standard shot, whereas on a tripod with a two-second delay, there is a visible difference. This might be because PS relies on the frames being lined up at pixel level which would be very difficult to achieve hand-held between the separate frames, regardless of how fast the shutter speed is for the individual frames.

For PS, pressing the shutter release blanks out the viewfinder for what seems like an eternity when you have the camera up to your eye, so there's no visual reference to confirm that you haven't moved slightly. Then, if you have moved, with motion correction off the output will be a little blurry, negating the effect of PS; and with motion correction on, the camera will select a reference frame and likely ignore the rest, so you probably end up with a standard non-PS shot.

Don't get me wrong - it would be great to be able to hand-hold PS pictures, but I haven't been able to do it effectively so far. Even with propping my elbows on a bridge parapet, I can't guarantee that I haven't moved just a fraction between the frames.

(BTW, the K-3II doesn't have motion correction control in camera - it's always on - but you can select on or off in DCU5.)

[BruceBanner]

The interval between each of the 4 pixel shifted frames is approx. 1/4th of a second. That means, even if the shutter speed and ISO are increased, motion blur is still very likely to happens because of the time delay between frames.
Now, for non moving subjects, I've found that PS yield the best results with lowest possible ISO and shutter speeds set at 1/4th of a sec. because a faster than 1/4th sec. wouldn't make the 4 frames taken much faster, and longer than 1/4th sec. would likely make PS more prone to motion artifacts. That said, you can still use PS in RAW, with OVF and take only one frame when converting to JPEG, it's like having an all electronic shutter while still using an OVF, which means, depending on shutter speed, sharper picture thanks to lack for mirror induced vibration and lack of shutter shock. However, all electronic shutter means that subject motion should still be rather limited not to get any rolling shutter effect. You can try different things and see how results compare.

Ah yes, so that explains how I felt that 1/1600 vs 1/250th felt absolutely no different in overall length of time start to finish of PSing.
If what you're saying is true, then the above example I gave with a man sitting on a bench in the park needed not be 1/1600th with 400ISO pixel shifted, a higher quality could have been achieved with ISO 100 and a lower shutter speed (the focal length looked wide so perhaps even 1/100th of a second should be sufficient with a stationary subject etc). Basically what I am getting at is in this particular case there wasn't an advantage to succeeding with a Pixel Shifted image trying 1/1600 ISO 400 over/vs say 1/100 ISO 100 (with all things being equal in terms of exposure, I'm kinda making these figures up to make the point)?

What is OVF might I ask? I only use LR and Photoshop (I usually bypass Camera Raw and head straight into Photoshop), what you're saying is that with OVF you can select one of the 4 frames used as a DNG and then play with that single frame and edit and make JPG?

Because...

I tried hand-holding some pixel shift pictures with the K-3II, and got no improvement over a standard shot, whereas on a tripod with a two-second delay, there is a visible difference. This might be because PS relies on the frames being lined up at pixel level which would be very difficult to achieve hand-held between the separate frames, regardless of how fast the shutter speed is for the individual frames.

For PS, pressing the shutter release blanks out the viewfinder for what seems like an eternity when you have the camera up to your eye, so there's no visual reference to confirm that you haven't moved slightly. Then, if you have moved, with motion correction off the output will be a little blurry, negating the effect of PS; and with motion correction on, the camera will select a reference frame and likely ignore the rest, so you probably end up with a standard non-PS shot.

Don't get me wrong - it would be great to be able to hand-hold PS pictures, but I haven't been able to do it effectively so far. Even with propping my elbows on a bridge parapet, I can't guarantee that I haven't moved just a fraction between the frames.

(BTW, the K-3II doesn't have motion correction control in camera - it's always on - but you can select on or off in DCU5.)

... if what microlight is saying is correct (to my understanding), then with Motion Correction On, and when hand holding the camera, there is a strong likely hood that only one frame is used and 3 discarded due to too much movement, especially with longer focal lenses. Because when chimping my hand held garden shots today I thought to myself "yeh.. they came back ok actually" but of course you're not going to see the benefits from PS on the LCD screen, nor did i pay strict attention to the file size at the time to confirm it actually was 150mb and therefore 4 images stitched successfully! I shall verify!

Is it obvious if the PS shot failed and only 1 frame used (ie lower fle size). Are these handheld Pixel Shifted images I've seen actually in essence likely to be a single frame after all? Because I can see a difference when Pixel Shifted has been used some of the time but not always...

[rechmbrs]

OVF is optical view finder.

I'd like to see comparison of ACR (LR or PS) to Rawtherapee with Pixel Shift "movement correction" turned on. ACR has no correction at all. The correction in RT is highly superior to Pentax program version.

There have been a few hand held PixelShift examples pass by but none showed as being close to the tripod comparisons.

RONC

[dakight]

The pixel shift algorhythm depends heavily on the camera and subject being absolutely still. As I understand it the motion correction is there to compensate for small amounts of movement within an otherwise motionless subject. One example might be leaves on a tree blowing in a slight breeze. The pixels are compared and some formula is used to determine what the final output should be. Using pixel shift on a handheld camera will likely give worse results that the usual single exposure.

[Rondec]

There is no way that hand held pixel shift would give any benefit over just a single shot, even with motion control feature. All the motion control does is masks out any places where there is movement between the frames, replacing it with the first image. In Raw Therapee, you can see how much motion there is and how much masking has to be done. I would guarantee that you would basically have to mask the whole image, leaving you with a single frame.

My experience with motion control in camera is that it still will produce artifacts if you have much movement (Raw Therapee is better). Anyway, there is probably a strong placebo effect here, where people believe pixel shift improves their image, even when it probably is exactly the same as a single image.

[microlight]

Brian's multi-exposure portrait process is a cool variant of the 'superresolution' method described on petapixel.com (search for 'A Practical Guide to Creating Superresolution Photos with Photoshop'), which actually relies on camera movement to simulate the sensor moving in between exposures. I haven't tried it (although have been meaning to), but have tried a similar stacking process where you can simulate the use of a ND filter for longer exposures in bright conditions, say for creating wave blur on a sea or river.

[Rondec]

Brian's multi-exposure portrait process is a cool variant of the 'superresolution' method described on petapixel.com (search for 'A Practical Guide to Creating Superresolution Photos with Photoshop'), which actually relies on camera movement to simulate the sensor moving in between exposures. I haven't tried it (although have been meaning to), but have tried a similar stacking process where you can simulate using a ND filter for longer exposures in bright conditions, say for creating wave blur on a sea or river.

I do wonder how useful that sort of "super resolution" would be.

The whole point of pixel shift seems to be to give a cleaner (less noise) file with better color data and less moire. When it works, it works well, but it doesn't give extra resolution -- which is fine for me, as having a high quality 36 megapixel file is good enough for me.

[rechmbrs]

Unless you record true data no computer will give something real. Pixel shift and the Olympus algorithm use real data.

Pixel Shift doesn't increase the resolution passed the sensor sampling but it sure fills the spatial response closer to what can be done. Pixel Shift fills in 2/3 of the color information. A whole 66% without an interpolation!!! Even with the so called movement problem and a minimal compensation the data is better. Too bad the eye usually looks for anomalies rather than the loss of noise etc. What is truly hidden under the interpolation?

RONC

[Adam]

Example; I could set the shutter speed to 1/1600 or 1/250, and the complete process (not counting the actual 'stitching and processing image part at the end') still felt the same.

There is about a 1/4s delay between the shots regardless of shutter speed, so there's not much that can be done about it.

Also with MC on, hand-held pixel shifting should essentially result in a single conventional image (it will cancel out the merge with the remaining 3 frames). Not something that is intended, nor should it (theoretically or practically) carry any benefit given the current implementation. As others have pointed out, manual stacking should prove to be a superior alternative.

[stevebrot]

I just have serious doubts about hand holding the K-1 for pixel shifting... prove me wrong!

No.. but in all seriousness, has there been a more indepth comparison of hand held pixel shifting vs regular shooting and whereby the trade off occurs?

You have the camera in hand and should be able to do an apples-to-apples comparison in less time than it took any of us to respond. But since we are all here, it has been tried before by users on this site and the result without MC was ugly. As Adam noted, with MC on, one basically gets the first of the four exposures. The rest of the data are simply thrown away.

@dcshooter's use of standard modified "super resolution" technique (requires slight movement between frames) is a much better approach if a tripod is not available.


Steve

[stevebrot]

When it works, it works well, but it doesn't give extra resolution

This is correct. The pixel dimensions are still the same. However, the amount of data collected is much higher, hence improved detail capture and color accuracy.


Steve

[Rondec]

Honestly, I run these images through Raw Therapee and I will click the button that shows the areas that need masking. If that area encompasses fifty percent or more of the image, then I don't bother with the pixel shift at all, rather I use the Amaze and pick the sharpest image of the four to develop.