I made a copy of the image in a different location. I didn’t want to disturb what I did only two years ago - you can all have a big laugh at my expense.
I couldn’t resist, and edited my copy, turning off all the things I didn’t understand in 2019.
Gee, it’s like looking at myself in a time machine - I was totally ignorant about PL3. I’m still ignorant in some ways, but less so than I was back then.
…and I sure hope DxO adds the Fuji X100f (and the others) in the next release!!!
Actually, unless the sun isn’t, at least, partially masked, I simply don’t include it and no amount of filtration can equalise the dynamic range from the sun to dark shadows. And, in this shot, the part of the sky with the sun was gin clear and would have been totally impossible to get within range.
The choice is include the sun, for better composition, or exclude the sun to avoid having part of the image “out of range”.
For me, a burnt-out sun is preferable, since nobody expects to be able to look at the sun anyway, but the lower on the horizon the sun gets, the better. Without the sun, the whole point of the photo is excluded - having a reflection but not having the thing causing the reflection seems wrong - to me.
Maybe a little trickery is in order, to “repair” the hole just enough so it’s no longer a “hole”?
The scale goes from 0 to 255, pure black to pure white.
Apparently some of my images really push the limits of what can be done.
Maybe there are better articles on how to deal with this, for scenes that include pure white and pure black. My interpretation of what Joanna is telling me is that my D750 sensor has a wider range, before anything goes pure white or pure black than my M10. Presumably the D810 goes wider, and the D850 goes wider yet.
I’m also wondering about color. I doubt that all the color scales match each other, so perhaps the red channel can be clipped at one end, and the blue channel at the other end, and shifting the scale one way or the other will make one color “better” at the expense of another.
I apologize if I’m using the wrong wording. I do know what I’m trying to say, but I don’t know the proper way to ask.
I’m also wondering why we can’t make a scale of 0 to 512, which would make things easier. Is the problem with the math, or the sensor, or the electronics, or ???
Changing the bit depth wouldn’t change anything. The histogram will look exactly the same.
The bottom figures, 0-255, are expressing the possible values of a bit depth of 8, 512 would be a bit depth of 9. You could replace the values with percentages, 0-100, thats bit depth independent.
Suppose, the pic is important to you as you kept it.
The fishermen, while turned to the viewer and being prominent in the composition, are the ‘subject’ and (should) catch the interest. – Unfortunately they are missing some illumination (not enough reflection on them) to be better recognized, which is causing ‘disappointment’ to someone, who has no memory of that moment. – Instead, the crossed poles and the bird very much at the edge gain interest as there is the highest contrast in the pic.
Technically there is no real chance to bring back the necessary light. Software can’t do magic – neither from the (non-existent) RAW-file nor an even more limited 8bit JPEG.
While I think it to be unfair to only comment on your pic, I’ve been looking for something similar, quiet and relaxing. – Looking back at the raw-file, I centered on the sun (to straighten horizon line and minimize lens reflection), used the available dynamic range to relighten the scenery, kept the interesting silhouettes and finally cropped for composition.
Imagine a raw image file. Nowadays, they deliver values in a 14 bit range. If we took that for the histogram, it would need to go from 0 to 16383 and if we wanted to see a histogram showing all of it, we’d need a screen that is at least 16384 pixels wide…
Instead of displaying a 14 bit wide histogram, only an 8 bit histogram is displayed, which means that each of the values between 0 and 255 include a range of 6 bits. This means that “0” includes all values between 0 and 63, “1” includes 64 to 127" etc, until “255”, which includes 16’319 to 16’383.
Using an 8 bit histogram is adopted by most applications. Apps like RawDigger can go beyond that.
I don’t know, if this is the right thread, but I will try to show you my problem. During the last summer i made a pale looking photo of the lake Tegernsee:
But the picture has still too much haze and it’s looking dark. Can you give me a hint, what can I do in Photolab to made this picture looking as with Lightroom?
See @platypus reply for an explanation of “squashing” 14 bits of information into an 8 bit histogram.
But histograms do not determine how many levels of tone that a camera can record, they are just a (very imperfect) way of trying to show the distribution of those different levels of tone.
If I take the original image of the waves on the rocks, with no adjustments, and export it to JPEG, I’m going to get approximately the same JPEG image that I would have got if I had shot it in JPEG on the camera.
If I then apply the same adjustments to that JPEG file in PL as I did to the RAW file, I get…
Compare that to the corrected RAW image and histogram and you will see that the JPEG image is “cruder” in its representation of colours, especially of the pebbles on the beach in the foreground. And the histogram is decidedly “lumpy”, where @platypus explanation of bunching levels together has forced the many subtle levels into one bunch with the same level.
In fact, your M10 has the same bit depth (14 bits) as your D750, so there is no difference in the number of bits.
But, where there is a difference is in the way the sensor reacts to a range of light falling on it.
You can see that both the Nikon cameras can be used at lower ISO than the Leica: the D810 at 64, the D850 at 32, but the Leica can only go down to 100. Apparently, this is a major contributing factor to the wider dynamic range, with the Leica having a range of 13 stops but the Nikons both able to cope with 14.8 stops. When you consider the each stop is double/half the luminance of its predecessor, that means, not roughly 1/5 more range, but 4x more “range”.
Not forgetting that, if you don’t use the minimum ISO, you are not going to get the full, advertised, dynamic range. For example, at 1600 ISO, with your Leica, you only get 10 stops, with the D810 you get 10.7 and the D850, you get 11.6 - the D750 comes out at 11.2 (better than the D810)
Which is why, for your sunset shots, your Nikon would be the better choice, even at 1600 ISO, because it can cope with twice the difference between minimum and maximum light levels, thus yielding better shadow detail if you ETTR.
I know that Platypus has already replied but, this thread is about sunset pictures, so you would have been better starting a new thread for your topic so that it doesn’t get lost in this very long thread.
This is normal. You also need to adjust the tone curve or selective tonality sliders
Haze in a photo tends to represent the lighter parts of the image. If you Dehaze (Clearview) then you remove the haze and therefore the overall image darkens.
To get the sky more dehazed you can use local adjustment and gradient to add local clearview on that section. Or a controlpoint.
Global clearview can be sharpen things too much on higher settings.
If you have filmpack you could use fine contrast with local adjument to keep sharpening by clearview within limits.
In retrospect, I agree. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I woke up in the middle of the night last night, thinking about this, and wondering what the key numbers I need to find from my camera information, to understand how well it will, or won’t, deal with “dynamic range” Megapixels is something totally different, so that’s separate.
Simple question - what data would I need to find in the specifications for Joanna’s new D850, to compare it with my cameras? Also, how would I find this kind of information about different brands of film? I realized last night how what I call “dynamic range” may or may not be capable of capturing a specific scene.
I think I need to re-read this topic, and find the related information that has already been posted here. I don’t think I understood it correctly.
The dynamic range is what your sensor can capture between the min and max expressed in stops, photo world It’s analogue. The graphs @Joanna showed from dxomark is just expressing that related to the isso you choose. Do you understand those graphs?
Lets make some definitions.
1 megapixels=> resolution => so important for crop % the more pixels the further you can crop in to a image without getting pixels duplicated in a 1080p screen if filled for full screen.
2 dynamic range => basicly amount of stops between 0 exposure and max exposure.
Usable dynamic range is noise threshold on the dark side and near blown white on the light side.
3 iso and DR, => some sensors are ISO invariant. Not completely but in a large scale if the ISO is raised the DR is not gettting smaller for a long time.
Others have a declining slope wile raising ISO. The first is better.
4 bitdepth. => the more bits are used to define a color the more different colors can be defined in a rawfile. (jpeg is 8bits.) 12bits are enough for adobeRGB and some wiggle room.
Which is for most people enough. I am not sure but i think prophoto is also inside this bitdepth.
Sensor, exposure is analoge then readout is analoge, a voltage, after this there is a ISO gain adjustment, stil analoge.
ADC, analoge digital converter. This is sampling a voltage in to a “number” so here it starts to be digital. Store those numbers in a raster and you have it mapped.
This is a latent or virtual image. (mostly rgbg) every channel has its own number. Just luminosity. The amount of light which created the voltage on the pixel and the four pixels rgbg are one group which is the data for a “color” which is used to get the rgbpixel glow in the “right” color.
So what’s important?
Noiselevel on low exposure, amount of exposure possible before the sensor is saturated.
And this is measured in the rawfile because all steps between sensor exposure and mapping is part of the SNR. And the denoising algorithm like deepprime is next in line to give you some more wiggle room.
The influence of ISO on this.
And ofcaorse features of the camera, looks, nobs and buttons…
Go the the measurement tab and look at “dynamic range” curves. You can switch curves between what they’d look if you compared images on a screen and printed on paper of one size. Note that your cameras are around 24 Megapixels total, while a D810 has 36 Megapixels, which means that it is larger by about 20% per side (almost 5000 pixels high compared to about 4000 pixels high.
If you set your Leica to ISO 800 and Joanna sets her D810 to 800, the dynamic range as measured by DxO is 11.04 vs 11.3 stops, a difference of only 1/4 stop. If your Leica should shoot at ISO 800, you’d have to set it to ISO 1600, which will take the Leica’s DR down to 9.9 stops… (all as seen on screen)
Leica’s measured ISO is one stop lower than the ISO that’s set in camera. This makes Leica’s results look better in these charts than they actually are.
It might not be a sunset but this is still about shooting high contrast as you would get with a sunset. We took this shot early last year as part of a tutorial. The question is, how did we achieve such a perfect exposure with the candle flame in the shot and the fruits and candle holder perfectly exposed?
. Thank you!
It’s analogue. The graphs 
