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Forum: Digital Processing, Software, and Printing
11-07-2016, 08:26 AM
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I thought some here might like to know that pixelshift is getting some love by a RawTherapee dev.
Jump in and see the discussion there if you want to share example pixelshift RAWs for testing. Pixls.us is a really nice site and community focusing on opensource photo processing.
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Forum: Digital Processing, Software, and Printing
11-07-2016, 08:13 AM
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Ingo Weyrich is currently working on pixelshift support in RawTherapee. Do join and say hi/show interest there if you like - Pixls.us is a nice site and community focused on opensource photo processing.
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
04-12-2016, 02:22 AM
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I went ahead with buying the Samyang 16mm (Amazon in the end) before our trip to Iceland, and I've been using liveview to focus and shoot with either a two-second delay or a remote release. Thanks again for all the advice! (Don't tell anyone, but there were a couple of times when I was hunting for a star to focus with - about ten minutes in the worst instance - before realising that I hadn't taken the lens cap off and was only seeing noise.)
I've still got lots of images to sort through and process, but here is one from our first real sighting of the polar lights. It's a shame about the cloud, but we did see another couple of displays later in the holiday, and one of them was against a fairly clear sky. Processed with Darktable, using its equalizer module to denoise and sharpen.
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Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
03-16-2016, 11:00 AM
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A warmish, selectively desaturated retro version using Darktable.
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Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
02-29-2016, 04:45 PM
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I spy windows, in Troisdorf, Germany.
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Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
02-29-2016, 04:16 PM
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I like the PP Challenge concept. This is my first effort, and I used Darktable.
Nice lines in the foreground, Rimfiredude.
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Forum: Pentax K-3 & K-3 II
02-29-2016, 02:55 PM
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Thanks, everyone.
I'll watch some calibration videos and try performing it again. Apparently it can be inconsistent? I'm not even sure what exposure times the astrotracer is supposed to provide for. Anyway, more reading and experimenting required. Thanks for the note on the limitations, too.
Okay, I'll definitely try out those kinds of settings next time. There weren't any firmware updates available for the K-3 II last time I checked. (Only the K-3.)
Thanks for sharing those diagrams. I've seen some shots showing those paths, like Elia Locardi's Church of the Good Shepherd shot. However, I think in this case it's not due to that as the paths of the stars in the non-traced shot aren't like that.
I've done a little searching on Pentax DSLR debug menus and I haven't found any reference to setting focal lenghts, unfortunately.
My wife has the Pentax 12-24mm, so I'll also try some traced shots with that and compare. Thanks again.
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Forum: Pentax K-3 & K-3 II
02-29-2016, 11:30 AM
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For testing purposes I shot the night sky for the first time the other night, with a 16mm Samyang lens. For the last shot I tried the astro tracing feature, and here's the 300-second exposure's result. I can see that the sensor was moved as the tree's branches, lower right, are blurry. (The other non-traced shots have sharp branches as it wasn't windy, and here's an 856-second non-traced exposure to show the sharp branches and trail directions.)
I've since realised that the star trails in the traced shot are not consistent with each other in length or direction; instead, the (erroneous) trails seem to visually originate/zoom out from somewhere near the centre of the frame. I then wondered if this is due to my only being able to select 15mm when inputting the focal length - not the actual 16mm of the Samyang.
I'll do more testing, but do you know if it's going to be impossible for me to use the astro tracing feature with a lens that doesn't communicate its focal length and that doesn't happen to match one of the focal lengths available for selection by the camera?
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Forum: Pentax K-3 & K-3 II
02-29-2016, 10:43 AM
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Spaninator357: nice! I've got an old 80-320mm Pentax telephoto and a 2x teleconverter, so I'll have to have a go at moon shots, too. Thanks for posting.
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
02-29-2016, 03:48 AM
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Are you saying that when the camera has pixel shift set to on, releasing the shutter with the remote results in a standard (non-pixel shift) capture? I've just tried pixel shifting in live view with my Pentax wired remote and it does take a pixel shift shot.
Is it this model you have?
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Forum: Pentax K-3 & K-3 II
02-25-2016, 01:17 PM
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I fitted ACMAXX "shields" to our K-5 and K-3 II the other day. I can't speak to how protective they are as I've not had any experience of bumping/bashing them (though it seems like it should do well), but they fit well and were quite easy to fit. I like that they also protect the top display.
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
02-12-2016, 01:57 AM
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Beautiful! I love the lighting of the second shot.
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Forum: Pentax K-3 & K-3 II
02-12-2016, 12:08 AM
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Lightroom can use pixel shift RAWs from Pentax, and you have to drag the sharpness slider up past 100 for it to take effect if I remember correctly.
Take a look at the page I linked to in the original post for more detail. (No pun intended.) I believe PDCU is better at dealing with movement between the four shots.
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
02-12-2016, 12:01 AM
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Thanks. I didn't initially explain that very well, and I've now edited the post: the first attachment is the end result and the second is just to show the unedited version.
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
02-11-2016, 01:47 PM
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This is the the first shot I took with my newly-acquired K-3 II that wasn't just for testing purposes. The site and forum have been massively helpful with researching and choosing the camera and lenses (thanks!), so I wanted to post the first attempt here.
I've included the unedited version (second attachment), which is the result of loading the RAW into Darktable with just the base curve applied.
After adjusting exposure, adding saturation with the Velvia module and cropping, its elements still lacked visual separation, with the image being rather uniformly busy, so I masked the buds and petals and desaturated the surrounding area to let them stand out. Other steps taken include softening, vignetting and profiled noise reduction.
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Forum: Pentax K-3 & K-3 II
02-11-2016, 08:51 AM
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I didn't think Adobe used dcraw, so I checked David's site:
I guess it's licensed permissively.
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Forum: General Talk
02-10-2016, 04:07 PM
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Forum: Pentax K-3 & K-3 II
02-10-2016, 04:55 AM
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That looks like a nice service - thanks!
I believe red squirrels are also compatible with the pixel shift feature, yes. I'm not sure about grey ones, though.
Thanks for that and the link. I must admit, I was thinking only in terms of fine detail and edge contrast. I gather it can help with colour in a more fundamental way, too?
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Forum: Pentax K-3 & K-3 II
02-09-2016, 05:41 AM
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If you mean viewing the whole image on typical monitors without zooming in, no; sharpness will be determined more by the resampling method used when saving the file and the scaling method that the web browser uses at sizes other than 1:1. (Unless you severely crop first, in which case it could well become relevant.) I'm not so sure that “super resolution”/pixel shifting is irrelevant for typical printing, though. I suspect that given a high enough quality print service a difference could be seen at typical print sizes.
On the subject of print services, does anyone have any recommendations for a service that is in or delivers to a) Germany, and b) the UK?
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Forum: Pentax K-3 & K-3 II
02-09-2016, 12:19 AM
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I'm glad the results are of interest. I know it won't make much difference to most of my photography as I don't do much printing, at least not yet, but it is nice to see more of what the lens can do.
Yep, PS results on the right. (I'm glad you could tell!) I'm guessing it could make some difference with very high quality printing even at moderately large sizes.
Is that with dcraw or the modified version called dcrawps which does detect movement? I've got a few threads to read up on and will then try it out as I would rather not have to boot into Windows for this, and PDCU kept crashing in my Windows VM.
I know, right? We got him on holiday in the Lake District, UK.
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Forum: Pentax K-3 & K-3 II
02-08-2016, 02:48 PM
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(Not a real owl, I'm afraid.)
I recently got a K-3 II so thought I'd do a pixel shift test and post it with comparison 1:1 crops in case anyone wants to see some of those. Although this pixel shifting has been around for a while it's still a new concept to me! It was also an excuse to try out the wife's photo studio box.
I used Pentax Digital Camera Utility (PDCU) 5.4 as outlined by the Pentax Forums K-3 II review here. No lens correction or other changes were applied. For the non-pixel shift shot, I used PDCU's standard sharpening mode (the fine sharpening mode wasn't helping in the same way it does with pixel shift shots and seemed to be having an undesirable effect), and applied as much of this standard sharpening as I could before angled edges got very obviously pixelly/jaggy.
The lens is the HD DA 20-40mm at 36mm focal length, F16, 1/3 sec exposure. As an aside, I also took a shot with the wife's SMC DA 35mm F2.8 Limited Macro, and my 20-40mm zoom seems to match it for detail here in this non-macro shot.
The overall shot sampled down which I include just for context, not quality:
The 1:1 crops:
I'll try using it in non-perfectly stationary scenes - I'm mostly interested in landscape photography - and see how PDCU and dcraw (modified version as discussed at this forum) deal with the bits that aren't stationary. I understand that they both attempt to use the data from one of the four RAWs in those areas which contain motion in order to avoid artefacts.
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Forum: Pentax Full Frame
02-08-2016, 01:49 PM
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I think Adam may have been referring to hand-shifted images composited (and aligned) with Photoshop or similar, as per this article:
It's pretty cool that this can be done without a tripod. I don't know if the results are as good as pixel shifting.
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
02-07-2016, 03:34 PM
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I'm a new K-3 II owner, too, and need to try out setting these user modes, etc.
One default setting I was surprised by was multi-bracketing needing the shutter release button to be held down for all shots to be taken. I found a setting related to it and now it only needs one push to set off the full series of bracketed shots.
Oh, and I like back-button focusing when using auto-focus.
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
02-07-2016, 03:08 PM
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I thought I had the same problem and spent an hour trying to get the camera to use version 1.21. My wife also tried from scratch as she's performed firmware updates on her K-5 in the past.
Then she pointed out that the firmware update is for the K-3, not the K-3 II which I have. I'm not sure why I didn't pick up on that in the first place!
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
02-02-2016, 09:44 PM
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Warnings duly noted, and I will leave well alone for the foreseeable future. :)
I've come across references to the past-infinity issue and hyperfocal focusing, and it's good to have your description of the process. Should be a fun project!
I'm guessing that the camera is also better able to inspect contrast and make finer adjustments as compared to non-liveview focusing. I'll do some reading on the topic.
Thanks, all.
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