Saturday 13 March 2010

London City Photography Walk


Tom has organized a photography walk around the City of London. This proved a great opportunity to take my new GF1 out for a spin. It performed excellently and I never missed a shot or had to wait for the camera to focus.
After I made some changes to the JPG settings the image quality straight out of camera improved and now reminds me of the GRD I and LC1 character. Even at high ISO where there is quite a bit of noise, the pictures look very good and crisp.
Here are the settings I made:

1. For color I started with the Dynamic film mode and made the following changes:
Contrast +1 (+2 at times), Sharpness +1, Saturation 0, NR -2
For this I also use the Cloudy WB setting since this gives the best colors outdoors.

2. For b&w I started again with the Dynamic b&w mode and use now:
Contrast +2, Sharpness +1 and NR -2 again.

Just as a disclaimer, I like high contrast images and am not concerned with either a high dynamic range nor do I like or want noise free images. This could help explain my choice in settings.

After today, I think my dream camera would be the GF1 electronics and m4/3 mount in a GXR body with the excellent Ricoh UI.

All pictures aside from one are JPGs from the GF1, the other is a JPG from the GXR.




3 comments:

  1. Looks like you are having a lot of fun with the GF1.
    Could you please elaborate on the changes you made to the JPEG settings that improved the image quality? I use G1 and I find the colors of raw files developed by lightroom much more pleasing then the camera's JPEGs. I wish I could apply some changes that will give similar look directly out of the camera.

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  2. Like you I have just got a GF1 and am trying to work out how to use it best. It really would be useful to learn how you tweak the jpeg settings. Are you happy with the WB as well?

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  3. Thanks for your comments!

    I am having a great time with the GF1 so far and really like the responsiveness of it.

    Here are the settings I made:

    1. For color I started with the Dynamic film mode and made the following changes:
    Contrast +1 (+2 at times), Sharpness +1, Saturation 0, NR -2
    For this I also use the Cloudy WB setting since this gives the best colors outdoors.

    2. For b&w I started again with the Dynamic b&w mode and use now:
    Contrast +2, Sharpness +1 and NR -2 again.

    Just as a disclaimer, I like high contrast images and am not concerned with either a high dynamic range nor do I like or want noise free images. This could help explain my choice in settings.

    The settings however works very well for me and mean I don't need to process the RAW files and can simply use the JPGs.

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