Originally posted by Laurentiu Cristofor I guess you might be saying that the loss of detail to clipping is more negligible compared to the loss of detail elsewhere due to NR? Is that it?
I wasn't talking about clipping at all. In the studio where everything is controlled, you can exposure right up to just before the clipping point. In the field, it's better to keep away from it, as the output becomes unpredictable and blown highlights are a good way to ruin a shot.
This camera does not respond well to strong ETTR or going past it. (There is less need anymore for this behaviour in an attempt to shoe-horn an image's DR into a camera's limited DR.) It has been calibrated so you really want to stay away from bouncing against the right of the luminance histogram. (Some cameras are calibrated so there is still a bit left in the tank so they're more forgiving of reaching or slightly exceeding the right of the histogram.) With this camera, the noise floor is so far down, it's better to underexpose up to a stop, and maintain some clipping headroom without having to worry too much about noisy shadows.
With the K-5, the best strategy is only ever use up to ISO1600, shoot raw, underexpose instead of raising ISO above that (all higher ISO is straight digital manipulation - like in most DSLRs) so you're losing clipping headroom unnecessarily if you're using higher ISO (unless you want to shoot JPEG), and boost the exposure in PP in your raw converter afterwards. This way you're preserving more clipping headroom, and you also avoid raw NR completely and thus have more flexibility to apply what type and amount of NR you want in PP.
Dan.
Last edited by dosdan; 12-31-2011 at 12:37 AM.