Over the past weeks I have been made very aware of the limits of what can be done with even the best of today’s Point and Shoot cameras. We are producing a catalog at my day job, and due to budgetary constraints I am doing at least some of the photography. My boss, a Canon DSLR user, is supplying images as well.
Of course, our ad agency is used to working with photographers who shoot large format digital, using digital backs on medium format cameras with superior Carl Zeiss lenses, and recording raw images. They also buy stock from photographers working primarily with pro-level DSLRs, again, shooting in raw, or who are even still doing high resolution scans from slide film.
While they loved my images for the overall concept, and used several in the preliminary layout, when it came time to send them the high-resoltion files for printing, the problems associated with P&S cameras, and jpeg files, came to the fore.
They wanted to use this shot of birders silhouetted against the dawn sky, taken at the break of light.
Break of Day Birding
Even though the image was taken at ISO 100, it required some work in Lightroom to restore the both highlight and shadow detail. Post processing a dark contrasty jpeg image brought out as much noise as though I had taken it at ISO 400 or 800 in the first place.
Processed Version: bringing up the details of shadows and highlights
Just as noisy as an ISO 400 image.
Then too, the zoom on the camera was at it’s wide end, and wide open (using the largest aperture)…not its best optical option, and, when our agency blew the image up to the size they thought they needed for printing, chromatic aberration was obvious around the dark figures of the birders in the corner of the frame (worst possible placement for CA).
Chromatic Aberration rears its ugly head
Together the noise and CA made the image, in the eyes of our agency, unsuitable for reproduction.
Now, there is a difference today between traditional graphics standards of the print industry and what would actually work for reproduction. A digital file that shows all kinds of problems at 1 to 1 resolution, when viewed pixel by pixel, will print just fine at standard page sizes, and our pages were only about 7 inches at full spread. I am convinced that this image would have reproduced well on a digital press, printing direct from the file, but I suspect that they were trying to make separations from it (three separate color plates that would be combined in different inks to produce the final print). That would have been a problem with this image.
It took some talking to reconcile the printer language and the photo language to come at what the real issues were.
In the end, I took the image back into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for a different kind of post processing than I would have applied for a direct digital print.
Lightroom has a very efficient Chromatic Aberration filter. That was my first step…to see if I could eliminate or minimize the CA. Then I used the Noise filter in Lightroom to reduce the noise in the image.
CA and Noise filtering in Lightroom
Unfortunately, while the noise filter in Lightroom is excellent for removing noise and maintaining detail, it just was not aggressive enough for this job. Therefore I chose Edit in External Application from within Lightroom. I created a psd (photoshop format) copy of the image with the Lightroom edits included (a simple click-button choice in the External Ap dialog), and opened the file in Photoshop Elements. In Elements I applied heavier noise reduction.
More aggressive noise reduction in Elements
Finally I saved the file in psd format so that I would not introduce any more jpeg artifacts, and sent off by ftp to our agency. They were happy!
Was that a lot of work? Yes it was. Sort of turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse.
I went through a similar process with several images from a recent trip to Bosque del Apache. I was shooting mostly pure white birds with black wingtips in full sun, moving birds, action shots. Such shots push the limits of both the exposure accuracy and the dynamic range of the even the best P&Ss. I ended up with some decent shots, except that the brightest white of the birds burned out (exceeded the ability of the sensor to record light) that the sky reflection on the upper side of the wings turned what should have been shadows a relatively bright blue. Both problems could be minimized in Lightroom, using the recovery slider for to bring out as much detail as possible in the highlights, and desaturating the specific blue channel to return the shadows to a more neutral gray (something I could only do because there was no actual sky in the shots).
Coming in Hot: too hot for the highlights and too blue in the shadows before Lightroom
In both these cases, a raw file from a DSLR would have provided a superior image. I know that. Still, given the will and means, it is possible to produce images with a P&S that will satisfy the most picky of critics (print professionals). And, clearly, the examples I have highlighted here are extreme. Most files from a good P&S, and certainly from on like the Sony DSC H50 these were taken with, would reproduce just fine, and meet the specifications of the most picky printer.
Still, this kind of work is right up there at the limits of what can be done with P&S…right at the edge of the envelope.
To be fair, my next piece will explore just how much you can do by taking advantage of the full range of benefits a P&S super zoom offers.
