e-420 flower shot/ DR analysis... (JPEGS)

[Raist3d]

So here for the curious. I shot a flower in RAW, but developed in Natural mode, Gradation set to auto, in-camera so the JPEG output is identical to having shot JPEG in the first place. It's the JPEG what I want to analyze....

So at first the yellow flowers in some "highlight burned" areas looks a bit burned depending on your monitor settings. Turns out that it isn't, highlight is a super bright yellow and you can bring it down even in JPEG if you had to.

Here's the *full* jpeg out of the camera, renamed. Natural mode, everything else at +0, gradation auto (that means SAT is on).

http://raist3d.typepad.com/secretfiles/files/Flower.JPG

The next pic is the analysis using LightZone (and showing 4 pics at once on my Mac desktop):



You can see from the lower-left pic that the highlight still has valid non burned RGB values. It took me 3 lightzone zone-mapper operations to get to where the data was just the bare bones of it.

There's a lot of detail there. I think the jpegs are definitively "richer" than the e-410 were, and this is one of those situations where the e-410 in jpeg would have probably "blown" the highlight. RAW is a different matter in general.

I haven't done any assesment of raw highlight recovery with the e-420 because Olympus Studio/Master are horrible at highlight recovery and LightZone/LightRoom, world+ dog still don't support the e-420 raws.

Not that this matter much to real world photography in the end really, but wanted to make a post for the curious about the e-420.

--
Raist3d (Photog. Student & Tools/Systems/Gui Games Developer)
Andreas Feininger (1906-1999) 'Photographers — idiots, of which there are
so many — say, “Oh, if only I had a Nikon or a Leica, I could make great
photographs.” That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life. It’s
nothing but a matter of seeing, and thinking, and interest. That’s what
makes a good photograph.'

[Paul Shields]

Interesting results Raist. To me this is why I still stick with RAW. The fact that 'Lightroom,world+dog' don't support RAWS is not true if you convert to DNG is it? I've always found Adobe much quicker at releasing RAW updates compared to say Apple.

[Raist3d]

Originally Posted by Paul Shields

Interesting results Raist. To me this is why I still stick with RAW. The fact that 'Lightroom,world+dog' don't support RAWS is not true if you convert to DNG is it? I've always found Adobe much quicker at releasing RAW updates compared to say Apple.

But how do you convert to DNG? If Adobe doesn't support it in LightRoom it means it's not supported by their RAW-> DNG converter either. BTW, I said LightRoom, not Aperture.

Also what I said if anything proves that JPEGS are fine, I don't understand the relevance of the RAW comment.

- Raist