Unless I don’t understand what you try to say, in Joanna’s picture there are no lines like DOFn and DOFf. So what do you compare???
But to be sure, you don’t have a tilt lens, isn’t it? You have a shift lens.
George
Not always.
Not quite - Plane of Focus (see the legend)
They are rarely equal. It all depends on the angle and focal length of the lens.
Strictly, the region of “acceptably” sharp focus. Truly sharp focus only ever happens on the PoF.
Of course the aperture is involved but the DoF doesn’t change with distance in front of the camera. Instead, it is the zone between the DoFn and the DoFr planes - shown on the diagram as yn and yr.
This is one particular subject that is much easier to understand when stood looking at the screen and seeing what effect the movements have. Nobody I know works from calculations, just looking at the screen with a loupe and iteratively adjusting tilt and focus until everything is “right”
Another reason for not bothering with tilt/shift lenses on a small format camera, where it is almost impossible to see the fine differences that are visible on a larger ground glass screen.
Yup. Best advice yet. Ignore all this stuff as, without an LF camera or, at least, a tilt lens, you’re never going to need it.
Just put him on the ignored list.
This topic was created by MM, so it is “owned” by MM. While the title is interesting, it’s meant only to bring more people to make MM happy. It may soon reach 1000 posts without any relevance to the topic’s title. Topics created by MM are meant also to provoke Joanna to respond. Unfortunately, the Jinn got out of the jug, and MM tries to derail other topics too. Which reminds me of the following two:
German text, I saw in one of the offices. good read for MM, it seems:
Wenn Sie nichts zu tun haben, tun Sie es bitte nicht hier!
and a classic limerick
There was a lady of Niger,
Who went for a ride on a tiger,
They returned from the ride,
With the lady inside,
And a smile on the face of the tiger.
If you scroll up to @Joanna’s post way up above, with the illustration, THAT is what I was responding to.
Good techniques might very well include a “shift” lens, or a “tilt” lens, and those lenses certainly can be relevant to this discussion.
You are being silly. I may have started the thread, but in no way do I “own” the thread.
Since @Joanna is one of the most knowledgeable participants in this forum, I VERY much appreciate anything she has to say. And when I don’t understand, of course I am going to follow up with a question.
But I love your poem!!!
Perhaps you speak German; I don’t. Sorry.
But I am curious, if you care to translate into English.
Not that any of this has anything to do with B&W photos - or does it? 
For creating B&W Photos? Or for creating photos regardless of the post processing?
My impression was that this topic was about using PhotoLab to create B&W photos, but maybe my deteriorating old brain fails to understand things…
Two words for this:
Forum Drift
It’s a forum, not a book. …but to my eyes, all of that discussion was relevant, as yet another technique to improve photos, including B&W photos.
Curious, do you know anything about “shift” and “tilt” lenses?
I know a little, and own a Nikon “shift” lens, and am learning things from that post that I knew nothing of before.
Have you ever used a camera with “shift” or “tilt” before?
Instead of being critical, maybe you could ask what those lenses do, and why, and then you would understand why that small discussion was relevant.
Correct - if the tilt lens was useful to me, I would buy one to use instead of my shift lens, as the tilt lens does both.
I’m just trying to understand the drawing @Joanna posted. This week I will read more about this, and hopefully understand.
If I had a spare $1,000 sitting around, I might consider this:
https://www.keh.com/shop/nikon-pc-e-nikkor-24mm-f-3-5d-ed-ultra-wide-angle-lens.html#view-2
…but I don’t, so I won’t, and I haven’t used my shift lens in over ten years. Nice to know it works though.
Have you ever moderated a forum?
If I wanted to know that I would certainly have opened a dedicated topic.
[edit]
Ah! I see you just did that. Great, thank you!
Interesting coincidence, and great idea. I just entered a new topic.
Nikon Perspective Control Lenses - only for interested people
Yes, I’ve moderated a forum, one of the first free forums in the USA, with 16 incoming phone lines, an internet link, a “Dectalk” link (for blind people). It ran on an Altos Unix computer, and the name was M-NET. I bought the Altos, my friend wrote the forum software (PicoSpa), and it was freely available for anyone, including full access to the UNIX operating system - which allowed people to create their own bbs running on my computer. You can read all about it here:
Great Green Room: A Partial History of Computer Conferencing in Ann Arbor
It got to be more than I could handle, but I loved those discussions.
Back to your question - I had a reasonably simple question for @Joanna, but the more I’ve learned, the more I thought this deserved its own topic.
I do a lot of b&w conversions but rarely think about camera settings specifically for b&w - my main concern after composition is with focus and exposure.
My usual process is to assess the photos for quality and after basic tweaks in PL including pulling back any very bright highlights if the photo has a high dynamic range, I do a colour processing with a Nik module, usually Viveza. If I’m going to make a b&w version I then use Nik Silver Efex. Of course you can go straight from PL to Silver Efex, but I find Viveza a very quick and easy way to add some “pop” to the image, which can also help to make the subsequent b&w image more striking. As I read somewhere some years ago, digital photography is a huge boon to b&w imaging because you can make settings in the colour processing specifically with b&w processing in mind, such as making certain colours brighter or darker or more or less saturated.
If you’re not already familiar with Nik Silver Efex, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Not all the other Nik modules are as useful but there’s enough in Viveza, Silver Efex, Color Efex and Analog Efex to keep you experimenting for years, with lots of presets to start you off.
No, not at all familiar with it. The more you write about this, the better.
I have both the original (free) version of Nik, which I downloaded from the old Google sights, and I also bought the DxO version, which I haven’t used in ages. I’ll have to find my Nik and find Silver Efex.
If you want to have a go at it, here’s the original raw image for a photo I took this morning:
780_6172 | 2024-07-17.nef (30.0 MB)
This is what I created an hour ago:
…but that was done with a Preset. I also edited the original image as best I could in Photolab.
What will Silver Efex do, that I can’t already do using the PhotoLab tools?
As long as you already have FilmPack, nothing worth knowing about.
The Nik tools are intended primarily for folks who use them as plugins for Photoshop and other non-DxO tools.
They do not convert from RAW, so you would still need to use PhotoLab or, at least, PureRAW as well.
Personally, I stick with PL, FP and VP as an all in one, complete solution.
Thanks; while I have the various versions of Nik, I haven’t used any of them in years.
I’m trying to keep most of what I do inside PhotoLab, but a few times I’ve used Topaz. Not sure how, as I don’t remember ever buying it, but this was years ago, when I tried to sharpen photos with it.
One less thing on my to-do list.
Silver Efex - even the old free version which I also started with - has loads of presets for different styles of b&w, plus presets for specific types of film if that’s what floats your boat. You can experiment with different kinds of contrast, grain etc. etc. etc. It’s widely regarded as the best available b&w suite and has always been the star of the Nik bundle - it’s what made me get serious about b&w. There’s so much to enjoy there!
But it doesn’t take RAW files without conversion to something like TIFF.
Can someone please explain why anyone would use it over PhotoLab and FilmPack when you can simply take a RAW, apply a B&W film preset, make all sorts of adjustments including filters and still have access to the RAW adjustments at any time?
What is more, because SFX needs a deRAWed copy, every image has to take up at least twice the disk space.
Silver Efex may be absolutely wonderful, but it’s more important to me to continue with my RAW files. I’m no expert at this in PhotoLab, but creating B&W images seems to be working well for me.
If I wan’t shooting in RAW, I probably wouldn’t be using PhotoLab.
You might say “I don’t know what I am missing”, which is true, but why would I want to duplicate files, using up even more disk space, if I can get what I want from PhotoLab?
It might be interesting if you were to post an original image file here, along with what you’ve accomplished in Silver Efex, so any of us can try to edit the image using PhotoLab tools, and we could all compare them.