Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/12/29
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]It's stating the obvious, but online digital delivery of photographs requies just as much skill & technique as taking the original photo. Some tricks I have learned: o Use C41 colour neg film. It has a much wider exposure lattitude and is more forgiving of different light source colours. My current favourite is Kodak PJ100. o If your image contains an extreme range of highlights and shadow detail, then scan the image twice - once for the highs & once for the lows. Then merge the two images digitally. o A Polaroid SprintScan 35 (or 35+) is easier to work with because it gives you better software control over the image capture, mainly in being able to edit individual RGB curves. The Nikon scanners are better hardware-wise, but their software lets them down (IMO!) o Use PhotoShop (current version 5.02) on a mac (G3/ 128++ RAM) with a 6x8 graphics tablet. Get to know PShop well - it is an amazingly powerful program. A good book to get is: "Real World Photoshop 4" by David Blatner & Bruce Fraser. o Having praised pshop - *don't* use it to save your final JPEG images! Use a specialised program to do this: "ProJPEG 3" (pshop plug-in) for mac <www.boxtopsoft.com> "JPEG Optimizer 3" (app) for wintel <www.xat.com> Neither of these is hyper expensive, and yet they give precise control over the JPEG process and give you the highest quality/ smallest download images possible. o Keep in mind that different people have different monitors set to different levels of darkness. Which means an image which looks fine on your setup may look hopelessly dark and blue on mine. Or vice-versa. You can never win with this & at times it will drive you nuts! o As for the moaning about www images not having the detail prints do - check out Livepicture's server based solution called 'zoom'. It allows you to upload 50 MB images with all the detail you could ever possibly want. With these, users can view them low-res, then zoom in for details - hence the name. Okay it ain't perfect, but it works <www.livepicture.com> o So where is Leica in all this? Quieter cameras, better lenses! Does it matter for digital? IMO yes. In the six months I have been using Leica I have found an improvement in my image quality, especially in handling contrasty light. For VR work (my main speciality), the Leitz 16mm is streets ahead of the alternatives (& hence my main reason for going Leica 6 months ago). For an example of a recent Leica non-vr image (R6.2, 90mm Summicron, PJ100) using the above techniques, see: <http://www.nemeng.com/photo> ... a bit saccarine perhaps, but it *is* after all the christmas holidays! Regds, Andrew Nemeth VR MEDIA SOUND PHOTO JAVA nemeng Warrimoo Australia www.nemeng.com