Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/12/29

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Subject: [Leica] Re: Leica + digital delivery
From: Andrew Nemeth <azn@nemeng.com>
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 98 13:40:19 +1100

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