[Leica] About to take M8 plunge - but worried about blown highlights...

[jayanand at gmail.com (Jayanand Govindaraj)]

Not cheap, but very effective - its a part of Nikon Capture NX:
http://www.niksoftware.com/viveza/en/entry.php?view=intro/viveza_announcement.shtml
Cheers
Jayanand

On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 3:12 PM, Daniel Ridings <dlridings@gmail.com> wrote:

> I can see your point, though the jpgs I looked at on the site you
> mentioned (I could only look at the embedded jpgs) would have passed
> my criteria (but I don't take much color, so I'm just a hack).
>
> Your best bet sounds like it would be to take a digital card into a
> shop that has an M8 and ask them to let you do some test shots. I
> suspect that only you can judge the results.
>
> If I remember correctly Lightroom or at least Photoshop has some tools
> to help you pull some details out of the extreme highlights. But in
> general, I'd compare digital capture to color transparencies, not to
> color negative films.
>
> There are so many benefits of digital over color negative films that
> even if I'd have to sacrifice one thing on my wish-list, there are so
> many others that are so much easier to deal with than they are in film
> (color temperature ... consistency across a whole shoot in a social
> situation, for example) that I'd still opt for digital when it comes
> to color.
>
> This from a die-hard film addict.
>
> Daniel
>
> On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 11:10 AM, Wyndham Pulman-Jones <simonpj@mac.com>
> wrote:
> > The one thing that has held me back from buying an M8 is my dislike of
> the look of blown highlights in digital photos. Almost all of my shooting 
> is
> of people interacting in social and working situations - and I always 
> expose
> by taking incident readings for people's faces and letting everything else
> fall where it may. This frequently means that lighter exteriors visible
> through windows or doors are overexposed - but when using fast colour
> negative film there is almost always some tone and character to the
> overexposed area. The same also applies to highlights on people's hair when
> strongly backlit.
> >
> > When I have used digital (Epson RD-1, Canon 1Ds) I have not liked the
> totally white blown out highlights, fringed with un-natural looking
> chromatic aberation, that often result from shooting in this way (when you
> are not able to worry about exposinig for areas of the photo not carrying
> the narrative interest, which might end up significantly overexposed.)
> >
> > Does the M8 suffer from this just as much as any other digital camera? If
> so, what's the best technique for stopping those 'outside the scene'
> highlights from blowing out? Or is it just not possible with the M8 to 'set
> and forget' exposure in the way that you can with incident metering for the
> latitude of negative film?
> >
> > (I found some M8 DNG samples which show totally blown out 'through the
> window' highlights which have the digital look that just doesn't look right
> to me: http://rpo.eranet.tv/)
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Simon.
> > Cambridge, UK.
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Leica Users Group.
> > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
>