Alfisti, I do use the histogram a lot! On every shot I have to check them (the color histograms) to make sure the camera didn't blow any of the colors. I often have to re-shoot with some EV compensation. I re-shoot until I get a shot that does not saturate in any color, on any pixel, but has the lightest pixels as close as possible to the saturation level.
Actually, this instant review function with histograms for each color is a great tool!
OK, I now shot some comparison photos in BRIGHT mode. It's better, indeed. But still not really good. Seems that I will have to fiddle with the in-camera contrast and saturation settings. I hadn't done that much, because I was shooting in raw mode and processing in the computer, but that has given me poor results, with the pictures going grainy more quickly than I got a decent contrast. The in-camera controls work better.
I know perfectly well that I should shoot in raw mode and process the images in teh computer. And I started that way, and fully intend to go back to that. It's just that I found it quite frustrating, probably due to a lack of high quality software, and even more so, lack of practice in doing this.
My only significant practical experience with photo adjusting is when I did a lot of slide scanning. I used Ulead PhotoImpact back then. But this program is pretty dated now. I don't even know if the old version I have would run on my Windows XP PC!
What I was using now for raw processing was either FastStone (current version), or DCRAW (current version) feeding into Photoshop (old version 7). With the DCRAW-Photoshop combo, I tried using linear 16 bit TIFF files, and also doing the gamma correction in DCRAW and then using either 16 bit or 8 bit TIFF files. It doesn't seem to make much difference in teh results - the images I get are MUCH worse than the JPGs straight off the camera! That's what triggered my desperate post! I hadn't even noticed yet that the JPGs from the camera are better than what I was getting from my very raw raw processing (pun intended).
Paul, in these test photos I was not really looking much at the red. I was looking at overall contrast, color correctness, and grain. Teh comment about the red flower was just incidental.
I have shot macros of those red flowers, and also relatively close photos of the flowering trees. I found that I have to set the camera to an EV compensation between -2 and -2 2/3 to keep it from blowing the red and turning these flowers some shade of pink! Withthe very strong EV compensation, the flower's color looks quite good, but the background foliage has the brownish cast. This foliage is bright green in true life, and teh scene was lit by direct sunshine and a blue sky. A sample is attached. I slightly sharpened that image after downsampling, to optimize it for the small size. No other processing was done.
The samples I posted are not out of focus. Actually I focused the lens just a tad short of infinity, to get both the distant objects and that vegetation with teh red flowers (which is at about 80 or 100 meters distance) into focus. The foreground is of course out of focus.
I chose f/8 because that is about the upper limit of the sweet range of this lens when used on the APS format. So I get maximum depth of field possible before starting to degrade the ultimate resolution. At f/11 the resolution is already visible lower, due to diffraction. And at 5.6 I don't gain anything in resolution.
I'm old in photography. Just new to DSLRs.
The haziness you see in the cropped shop is precisely what I'm complaining about! It is NOT really there. It just shows up on the photos!
You apparently didn't notice my statement about the time this photo was shot: 10:30 am. The sun rises at around 7:00 here in this time of the year, and reaches its highest position at about 13:50. I'm at close to 40 degrees latitude. So the sun DEFINITELY wasn't anywhere close to direct overhead! Just look at the shadows, and you can judge the sun angle. It was pretty close to the optimal to get good color!
The air was extremely clean when I shot that photo. It rained yesterday, so any dust was grounded. There are no industries here. This region is fundamentally agricultural. There are times when there is smoke in the air, specially in autumn when some people burn off their fields as a way to prepare them for new planting. But definitely not now, in spring! The closest industrial plants are well over 100km away, and I have none upwind from my place.
I will eventually try filters. I have a circular polarizer, a simple UV filter, and also a strong haze filter. The polarizer will certainly increase color. But first, I want to get the camera to produce natural colors and contrast in its JPGs, and also I need to find out how to process the raw files to get a quality better than the JPGs. Otherwise the whole thing with raw files makes no sense!
OK. I have attached three pictures. The first two show the same scene again, at 14 hours, when the sun was almost exactly at its highest point. The first is shot is from the Kx in BRIGHT mode, with the controls of that mode set to teh default values, except for sharpness which was set to FINE, but still at the default value of the slider.
And the second picture is the same scene, shot by the cheapy point&shoot camera, immediatly after shooting it with the K-x. Both were downsized to 640 pixels wide (the format of the two cameras is slightly different though), and no other processing was done.
The contrast of the P&S is pretty accurate, while its colors are slightly over the top, but just slightly so. The K-x instead is still producing less contrast and less saturation than the scene has in true life, and the blue/yellow balance seems a bit off.
And the third photo is the flower, as explained above.
I suppose that from here I should simply play with the contrast and saturation controls of the camera to get the JPGs right. But what about raw file processing? Can anybody recommend a GOOD software for that, hopefully free (I'm not asking too much, am I)? I would like software that is able to display a histogram, separated by colors, while I'm adjusting everything. None of the programs I have can do that, and I really miss that feature!
And perhaps someone can recommend a good tutorial? To give you an idea of the level of tutoring I need: I do know how CCDs and CMOS sensors work. I'm an electronic engineer and have worked on astronomical CCD cameras for many years. But those CCDs are monochromatic. Color processing opens a lot of questions. I know what gamma is, basically, but the details of each curve, and why they are used, I don't know. I wonder why it is at all necessary to define a colorspace, why one cannot just use the white-balanced RGB channels for everything. As an old-standing hobby photographer, I have done unsharp masking for real, in the darkroom, so I know what it is (and I have found that most dogital photographers don't really know what it is!). But with image processing software, I don't know how they are really doing this process.
I have basic questions, such as which program REALLY does all the operations at 16 bits per pixel per color. It is suspicious to me that Photoshop 7 can open a 16 bit TIFF file, but then shows histograms in a scale of 0 to 255 only! Does that mean it immediately downsizes the data to 8 bits?
Lots of questions...
