GRD, f5, 1/1000, ISO 64, JPG b&w
After the post today I will post again a picture for the day but also as mentioned in yesterday's post the new RAW conversions.
Took this picture today after work with the GRD I, it is unprocessed and straight out of the camera.
Here are the new conversions, I chose only 2 pictures this time. If the question is "Can you get the same results from the other cameras when shooting RAW?" the answer is yes, you can but it requires more work for something you can have out of the camera. Even taking the RAWs from the GRD I requires some work but less than from the GRD II or LC1. Anyway, enough talk and on to the pictures.
You can probably get closer with some extra time but I did not have it. Now it is more difficult to tell which crops are from which camera and I can not tell it anymore looking at the small size images.
If you want to know what I did here it is:
- Set the EV at +0.5
- Sharpen the images pretty well
- Convert to b&w
- Uset the curves tool and select medium contrast to start off with, now darken the shadows more while you pull the highlights up a bit
- Use USM to sharpen the picture slightly more.
Cristian,
ReplyDeleteThanks again for the comparison. I suspected as much. The GRD1 seems a great camera for those who wish to shoot B&W JPG and not do much processing.
The GRD2 seems better for those who need RAW, work more in color, and don't mind additional processing to get the look they want.
I could make an argument for owning both!
Great! Thanks for your tips. Although I don't use Photoshop now, I believe many people do and the tips can give us some hints on how to do the pp with other software.
ReplyDeleteThe non-GRD photos look pretty close to the GRD jpg's now. Two things I noticed are:
1.The GRDII RAW of the first set and the GRD RAW of the second set seem not totally black and white. Compared with the others, it look a tiny bit reddish. (I also found this when I turn my GRDII RAW's into black and white.)
2. The GRDII RAW's are much noisier than the others. (This is what many GRDII users noticed when they compared the quality between GRD and GRDII RAW's.)
Questions I'd like to ask are:
1. Can we make a real b/w photo from RAW by further modifying the parameters?
2. What does it mean by the extra noises from GRDII RAW?
Yes, I was also very surprised by the additional noise of the GRD2 file! I've read that the GRD2 has a one-stop advantage over the GRD1 in terms of noise, so this does not make sense to me.
ReplyDeleteChris, you are spot on with your remarks. The GRD I is best for jpgs and especially b&w pictures and the GRD II for color work and RAW. Owning both is having the best of both worlds although right now I would say owning the GRD I and GX200 is an even better option :).
ReplyDeleteMike, find below my try at answering your questions:
1. I believe by further modifying the settings you could get an even closer look. The GRD II has a higher dynamic range which is probably responsible for the different tones in the image and make it appear reddish although it only has grey tones in there.
2. The extra noise seems to only come up when converting RAWs to b&w. While I need to do more tests to confirm, I believe it to be an issue with one channel which is noisier but does not affect color images in a negative way. My guess is the blue channel produces quite a lot more noise compared with the other channels and when converting to b&w and playing with the levels of an image it shows up as extra noise.
Overall, I have a hard time converting GRD II images to b&w, something that is very fast an easy on the GRD I. When doing the RAW conversions here, I noticed that I got the GRD I RAW files to look great with only minor adjustments but it took me quite a few tries to get the GRD II image anywhere close and it still shows more noise.