Dusk Photos

If your CCD was dirty, you’d know it.  Also, at f/5.6 you don’t see that much dirt on the sensor anyways.  You should see the dirt blobs on mine at f/32.  Anyways, you’re just near the noise floor of the sensor, especially in the dark parts of those images.  Have you ever ran them through a noise removal program?  I ran one of your images through Helicon denoiser.  I also did a 3 point S curve adjustment for a little added contrast because it was a little grayish.  I don’t know why you hate them so much.  They’re not that bad.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/n/m/nmb167/ForA/dsc08983_hnf_100.jpg

I uploaded the unedited version to the same address.  Check it out.  Noise removal got a bad rap from companies and people who just didn’t know when to stop.  Gimp never did a great job at it when I was using it.  Then again, I never liked Gimp so I never played with it that much.  This image was run through with the suggested level of noise removal decided by Helicon Noise Removal.  I got a free copy back when the Ukranianes were giving it away.  Now it’s gonna cost ya.

What I meant by the noise floor was just that you have a signal to noise ratio here that isn’t favorable.  Your signal is competing with the inherent thermal noise of the sensor, and apparently losing at the case may be.  When your signal is pretty low you run into these problems. 

Most CCDs are designed around ISO 100 or there abouts.  They offer their best noise characteristics there.  The ones that go down to 50 or lower generally do so at the sacrifice of dynamic range.

Check out some dedicated noise removal software that does the job well and can do both chroma and color noise reduction.  Done right it can really help things without killing your sharpness / quality.

I’m hoping and waiting for a day that GIMP catches up.  PS 7 is woefully outdated for what I usually want to do as well. 

Has GIMP finally added support for 16 bit color channels yet? 

As wonderful as I consider Photoshop to be, Adobe has been annoying the heck out of me with CS.  I use CS more than 40 hours a week at work.  It annoys me that I can’t open tifs as fast with CS as I can with PS7.  I’m talking 10 times slower.  What the heck is that about?!  Could just be that I use a MAC at work...

Man, it’s not about pixel resolution, it’s about utilizing the 12 bit color that comes off the camera sensor.  I’d rather preserve it accurately than down sample it to 8 bit.  It provides a smoother tonal range having a greater number of "steps" to work with.  This becomes much more important the more you get into heavy editing and stuff.

What color setting do you set your monitor to?  256 colors?  16 bit or 32 bit color?  It’s really the same idea.

Ya, RAW definately takes some extra time. 

Regardless of how much color depth a given monitor can display, it makes a big difference in editing.  A simple example that stresses my reasoning behind higher color depth:

You take a shot of an overcast sky and convert to gray scale.  So you’ve got 256 potential levels of gray in this image.  If you look at levels, you should have a large peak in the center of the histogram with nothing to the left (shadows) and right (highlights.)  Stretching that histogram (moving the sliders from the far right and far left inwards towards the central peak in the histogram)  creates fewer potential levels of gray.  Maybe you’ve got 120 potential levels of gray now.  After you do levels like that, and you look at the new stretched histogram you’ll notice lots of "holes" or jagged regions of the histogram where there is no longer any data.  This stretched histogram no longer has 256 different levels of gray and it suddenly becomes much easier to see that there are no longer fine gradations between each level of gray. 

Working at 16 bits with the same image gives you the same effect but to a much smaller degree.  256 levels down to 120 vs. 65,000 down to 30,600 levels.

As you said A, it doesn’t matter for a normal monitor.  You probably won’t notice it unless you’re doing editing that’s specifically utilizing the extra steps or color resolution available.  Printing or viewing a final product can be easily done with 8 bit channels, but some editing is really best done in 16.

After all, why keep uncompressed (or in your case, flac’d) waves on your computer?  Because we care about the extra resolution. 

Is this thread OT or what?  haha, it’s been fun.

By the way, I usually never remove noise from images, but I do ADD noise rather regularly. 

Later

I’m just curious... for which tasks is photoshop 7.0 "woefully outdated"?

I guess you never noticed the lack of an option for 48 bit color depth in your display properties?  Oh, my fault, you’re on a mac... your "monitors extension" or "system preferences" or whatever the hell they have.

In any event, what program do you use which supports such things at sixteen bits per channel?

Your fault Nathan, telling me that I didn’t read the rest of the thread when in fact I did.

The point is, obviously, how are 16 bit channels relevant to ANYTHING when you can’t view the color depth?  You tell me what it allows you to do while editing.

What you said earlier in the thread is basically that article in summarized form.  But...

Quoting the article::

the extra values represent additional accuracy, rather than additional range. Think of them as being fractional values: we now have 255 additional values between each of our 8-bit values.

On a monitor that can’t display the extra fractional accuracy, the most this can get you is a point of difference in color value in any channel, hardly noticeable.  The only time it’ll really help is when an image is particularly underexposed, and even then you can get the same results in 8 bit with some skillful manipulation.  If you don’t know how to do anything except auto levels, then yea, 16 bits.

I’m not sure why I have to be a photoshop expert to comment on your misguided posts about color depth... my major, however, is basically computer graphics.

These articles you post deal MOSTLY WITH THEORY, not much practicality.  If, when editing a photograph, you are "constantly truncating values over and over with each editing step that you take", THEN YOU PROBABLY aren’t very good at editing photographs. 

You gave the underexposed example because it’s the same one your first article gives.  I cited it because it’s one of the very few instances where 16 bit channels provides even an arguable advantage. 

I’ll restate what I told you.  You can get the same results using an 8 bit image simultaneously with a better-than-amateur AMOUNT OF skill.

It’s not even a matter of belief.  I understand what you’re saying and I understand the theory.  It’s a matter of disagreemeNT.  I can do the same thing with an 8 bit file that you can do with a 16 bit file, and probably faster.

"It’s not even a matter of belief.  I understand what you’re saying and I understand the theory."

Ok, so why comment on my "misguided posts about color depth."  I’m STILL waiting for an answer to that one.  If this is preference, practicality, a matter of taste, or a disagreement on any of the previously mentioned aspects, why have you still not given a definitive answer on how my misguided color depths are so misguided?

The many capitals started out as emphasis early on and later became a parody of some of your excessive capitals, not to mention their odd placement sometimes.

Obviously, you don’t need to talk down to me as if I’m a nobody when it comes to photoshop.  I might not be a "computer graphics major," but I do a lot of image editing on my own and for color and B&W print for the year book portraits and candids at Jostens.  Obviously, my job requires certain bits of knowledge and not others; just as my personal editing does.  I don’t know EVERYTHING about PS, but I do know more than the average person.

My entire point was, and still is:  16 bit makes a simple curve adjustment easier with less degradation.  Total 16 bit support allows me to selectively replace colors, channel mix to alpha channels to conveniently create detailed masks for selective sharpening (or whatever else I feel like adjusting selectively) all the while having adjustment layers for levels, curves, color balance, saturation etc. that can all be changed after print proofing (not to mention color space changes) to fine tune a print.  The more steps I add in, the more degradation of the image.  I don’t want that but it’s a fact of life.  So I work in 16 bit to minimize it.  It’s not readily apparent on all prints; I’ve done some great 8 bit edited ones too.  But I’m not making 4x6 prints (why bother?) and when I’m spending as much per print as I do to do 12x18s (and a couple 6x9 proofs) then why not have a workflow that maximizes quality and consistency? Some images need it more than others.  I think we can agree on that?

I just don’t see the point in starting a project by throwing away useful data in converting from 16 to 8.  I don’t see the point in printing a job that has a crippled tonal range because of editing, regardless of how apparent it is; sometimes it is, sometimes it’s not. 

Yes, A’s thing sucked.  I didn’t want to do much to it other than relieve the noise problem with a one click application and up the contrast a tad to drown out some of the more visible noise in the shadows.  It wasn’t something I spent some time on....  I work to much to have time to fiddle with other peoples stuff to a huge degree.  (I feel like I’m spending way to much time on this frankly.)

As for my posting crap as though it were absolute truth...  What did I state as such?  Your first post questioned my statement that photoshop was woefully outdated.  I’ll assume that’s it because it’s the only thing that makes sense.  My answer is:  "for what I usually want to do."  Simple as that.  I don’t see how that’s absolute truth to anyone else since I was obviously speaking in the first person.  PS7 doesn’t do what I want it to do.  Period.

I’m not sending you some photo that can’t be corrected in 8-bit because they all could be.  What would be the point?  If you want to offer some evidence, submit to my request to publish your workflow to get around banding problems or whatever.  You say that your "gradient fill layers, hue and saturation adjustments, selective color replacement, and channel mixers" will enable you to do the same thing faster, but I don’t know how.  Hey, I could learn something.  The thing I want to know:  How could you easily replicate a non-destructive curve adjustment using those techniques you mentioned?  Quickly and easily to boot.

For the last time, because I never mentioned alpha channels doesn’t mean I didn’t even know they existed.  You talk to me like I’m an idiot that thinks S curves are the end all be all. Grow up. Obviously I’m past that level but I’m not going to sit there and spout out every trite thing I know how to do to impress you or whoever else might be reading this.

I think the addition of greater 16 bit support in CS and CS2 was a welcome and needed addition for graphics professionals.  Sorry you don’t feel that way.  Many do, and if your world only revolves around 8 bit, best of luck to you because I fear you’ll be left behind with the way that the software giants seem to be headed.  My other question is:  Why haven’t you gotten over it? 

You don’t see me crying that the CD replaced the LP from a quality perspective.  That’s life, and some thought it’d be perfect sound forever.  Oh well, they were wrong.  Life goes on.

Ya, give ME a break.  Talking to you is the opposite of progress.  Always was, always will be.