Off-Topic - advice, experiences and examples, for images that will be processed in PhotoLab

DxO PhotoLab
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First a thank to Mike Meyers who has managed to get this often interesting tread going with a very good dialog!

@danielfrimley

Today it’ February and the light is coming back and we already have had some really fantastic and sunny days! Sweden is together with Norway and Chile examples of countries that are stretched over many climat zoonen from north to south and have many different “seasonal” variations for good and bad when it comes to photography.

It is true that the darkness many times setts the aganda and limit us in ways we don’t always like but it also give us some spectacular light conditions too - especially when it comes to the Stockholm Archipelago where I since 1961 have lived at least in the summer time on a small island just 700 meters in diameter.

The last 17 years I have lived in a small town out there called Vaxholm (less than 5000 inhabitants and 1 miljon visitors a year) which is the gateway to all of the 30 000 islands out there that stretches 250 km north-south and maybe 30 km east west.

Since we say we have eight different climate seasons out here and the conditions are so unstable all the year around the first advise is to always have something to take pictures with with you.

Here is a link with pictures from Stockholm under different conditions that I have called “Stockholm Noir”. Some of them are actually good examples of how fantastic the light can be just in February :-).

On top of the photo blog story there is a link I nowadays use to put in all my blogstories with a Google English translation link.

I also always use to add how fantastic Photolab’s image quality is and how well it handles low light conditions with Deep Prime XD and yes, there is a significant detail quality improvement with XD. I don’t really understand why there are photographers who want to live without it. It’s a real life saver for us here up in the dark north where the days are extremely short some times of the year.

Stockholm is on the same latitude as Alaska and only the Gulf Stream makes it possible to live here really and not to mention that Stockholm is “south” of our country, because Sweden stretches more than 1000 kilometers more to the north where it meets Norway and Finland.

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Thank you, I shall take a look at the link :+1: I think I visited Vaxholm as child - I remember a really big tower (though I was really small then so everything looked big :grinning:)

I guess the trick is finding conditions or subjects where the most contrast exists, on dull days much of my output also ends up B&W. I use dialled down Clearview quite a bit (and DeepPrime XD on pretty much anything) which is a good starting point - I do however wonder if there’s maybe something other people do “out of the box”, black and white points in the tone curve for example

A couple of snaps from my phone from November 2016, it was a sad time as I was attending my aunt’s funeral so that will have stuck in my memory as a grey time.

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If you like to turn some of the images into B/W than NIK Collection and Silver Efex Pro might be something too. I have started to use it a lot now for some older images I process. It´s really a great collection of presets.

Fine Contrast is also very important.

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Well, first of all, thank you to @Stenis - this forum, and these topics, are a highlight of my days. They take me away from whatever else is happening in my life, and become a real-life-course in photography, the good, the not so good, the bad, and the ugh!!

Also:

I have a prior question, which comes up far too often. When I capture an image like that, should I leave the “feeling” as-is, or should I try to enhance the image into something it wasn’t? Or, worded differently, should I capture the way the scene “felt” to me, or should I enhance it?

If I’m wearing my photojournalist hat, I should capture what I saw and felt.

If I take it off, as most of you encourage me to do, I’m likely to “improve” the image, while all the time making it feel “fake” to me. I would prefer for my photograph to show BOTH what I saw, and also how I felt.

With the two photos just posted by @danielfrimley the top image makes me think of a dull, gray, boring day, but the second image in b&w avoids that feeling by excluding the color. I think the extremely dark dirt in the foreground pulls my attention away from the more interesting parts of the image (my suggestion: snip!!), but I can no longer tell if the day was bright and sunny or cloudy and overcast. Excluding the lower part of the image, I like what I see:

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I never thought of it until just now, but maybe the first thing I should do on a dull day is switch to B&W.
Interesting. I never thought of that until now.

I get the uncomfortable feeling about NIK, as the image becomes what someone else did to it - leaving me with no idea “what” was actually done to the image. The result will likely be good, if the filter was good. But to me, that’s “cheating”. For better or worse, I want to do all the corrections individually, manually, and I prefer to do them all from within PhotoLab.

By the way, I love the crop I just posted - everyplace I look, there is something new to find! :slight_smile:

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Have you ever actually used the Nik Collection? In concept It is not that different from setting a film type using FilmPack from within PhotoLab and than applying edits to it. The biggest difference is that in the Nik Collection they are not predefined film types but instead a few hundred predefined filters which can then be modified to your hearts content. Having said that, like @Joanna, I prefer using FilmPack.

Mark

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Yes, I used to use it a lot, and taught others how to use it. I have copies of both the free Windows version and the Mac version, before DxO bought the rights, and released their own version. As far as I know, the free versions, from Google, are still available with enough searching. I also bought one of the packages from DxO, but I’m just as happy with the free software.

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NIK is a very good place for ideas as the presets are extremely varied and can generate ideas that you might not think of in which way to take an image. In the same way you commented that you hadn’t thought of switching to B&W on a dull day?
Any preset, even DXO’s default open preset, is just the beginning for what you want to do with the image.Assuming you are not just applying a preset and clicking save. Although, if the preset is giving you what you require then you just saved yourself a lot of time :slight_smile:

Deconstructing a preset can also be a good lesson in how the software works.

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As a tool to test things, NIK sounds like something useful to me. …but if one of my goals is to use “raw”, then NIK is a dead-end street compared to achieving the results from PhotoLab. For the purpose you mentioned, it might be great - but then I would certainly struggle with how to get the same end result from PhotoLab.

I predict what will happen - I will end up with a result from NIK that I very much enjoy, and rather than exporting the image to JPG, it’s already done. Long ago, I then struggled to add my name at the bottom. I think I did that with Lightroom, but I don’t remember…

Speaking of not remembering, as I think I recall, NIK only works on jpg images, not RAW. It’s been a long, long time, but if so, where does the jpg image come from, to be edited in NIK ? Long ago I shot in jpg, so this was easy.

To be honest, it also bothers me that instead of ME thinking what result I want, then trying to get PhotoLab to do it, I’ll once again end up trying dozens of choices from NIK until I find my favorite. I might have the best intentions, but if NIK magically gives me a result I really like, what is my reason for attempting to re-create it in PhotoLab? Maybe because PhotoLab is so good at dealing with digital noise? But if so, why not just remove the noise from the jpg image created by NIK?

I’m just thinking out loud, and haven’t had my breakfast yet. I’m in no way arguing for or against anything.

(I have Google’s version of NIK for both Windows and Apple, and I bought the version from DxO before I realized there was no reason to have done so. Since my version from Google was “free ware”, I’ve given it to a lot of people since then, and someplace I still have the link for where to download it. It can be found by searching…)

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Hello Mike,
NIK works wonderfully on the DXO exported 16bit tiff files.

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So, you’re suggesting that I open the raw image in PL6, do my edits, export as a TIFF file, and continue to edit using the TIFF file. That’s better than what I thought I had to do - thanks! …I guess that’s a perfectly reasonable way to use NIK.

So, unless I want to also use PhotoShop and/or Lightroom, how do I use NIK? Can I “export” my image into NIK somehow? The only way I remember using it is alongside my Adobe software.

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Which then means you will no longer be able to go back and edit any of the RAW adjustments.

The only “advantage” to using Nik tools is that they give you different presets, which might give you ideas for different look and feel but, nothing you couldn’t do in PhotoLab.

And you will have to keep, not only your original RAW file but, also, a much larger TIFF file as well, for every image you process on this way.

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Very true.

I never should have bought the DxO version of NIK, as I stopped using it when I switched over to PhotoLab. Stupid waste of money on my part, especially as I already owned it. Oh well.

It is an easy shortcut to “interesting” photos, but I don’t like shortcuts.

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Photo editing (for fun and your own use) is not an exam @mikemyers, you’re not going to be penalised for using any editing tools available to you - NIK could be a learning tool for how to achieve a look you like in PL. Wash your export through a few presets, find one you like, then try to create it yourself in PL. That’s not cheating or plagiarism, it’s inspiration.

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This old, but a light meter is measuring “incomming” light, not reflected light, so in principle it’s much better than any camera that can be tricked by shadows, reflections and highlits.

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How many of you cull in camera? I’ve always transferred everything I’ve captured and cull in the computer, formatting the card in camera thereafter. However, these D850 captures are huge at 100MB and the rear screen really is rather good

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It all depends. I don’t judge exposure on the rear screen because it is only a JPEG approximation. But I do look for composition and general “is it worth keeping for review on the computer?”

I use a USB cable to the camera and macOS’s Image Capture utility to transfer to disk and then delete the images directly from the card in the camera.

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I can understand why people might love that concept, but I don’t. For better or worse, I try to capture what I thought when I took the photo, using the tools to improve the image. I’m not really interested in seeing lots of other choices. When I took the photo, I already envisioned what I wanted the result to look like. NIK will come up with a huge number of possibilities that other people have made possible, but that’s not how I do things. NIK makes beautiful paintings, but that’s not what I’m trying to do. Something caused me to take the photo, and THAT is what I want to show in the final image.

For ages, many of my cameras have had “special effects” built in, and I’ve never wanted to try them. I enjoy HDR images, but I enjoy them the most when they simply show more of the details that I saw with my eyes - taken too far, and they no longer look real to me, which is important to me even if nobody else cares. What is “real”? It’s what I saw with my eyes, that prompted me to take the photo in the first place.

I had fun showing NIK to lots of people - gave them the software, and they had a blast! The “problem”, if it is a problem, is “me”. I already know what I want before I press the shutter button. Sometimes I change my mind, as I’m using PhotoLab, or long ago, Lightroom.

I’m not trying to knock what anyone else does with NIK, and I remember it being fun to see the possibilities, but the only way I would start using NIK again would be if it created something like the .dop file, with all the NIK changes, just as PhotoLab does, and the original file were to remain untouched. I think @Joanna described this best - once I’ve edited something in NIK, If I want to make a change I need to re-do the whole process, starting with my raw file. No more - I prefer how PhotoLab works, I just re-open the original image (with my previous .dop file), edit in PL, and when I’m done, I get a new .dop file.

I hope that since I’ve been educated so much in this forum, my harshest critic is now myself. People still give constructive feedback, as I’m not as good with the PL tools as many other people here, and that feedback is welcome. NIK just doesn’t fit in - for me - any more. To be honest, I don’t even remember how to. use it - it’s been that long!!!

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I used to, but now I cull in PhotoMechanic - easier, faster, and goof-proof (at least up to the point where I re-format the memory card when I put it back in my camera.

When I was covering races for the magazines, I would always cull my not-so-good photos in the camera, so that when I got back to the hotel or my home, I wouldn’t have multi-thousands of photos to go through. Back then I used high-speed-burst mode a lot, and out of the perhaps 25 images, I would cull all but three or four, leaving the final work until I was home. With my high-speed Nikons, I could capture the perfect moment and take the photo - but if a car crashed, and went flying in the air, by the time I started to capture images it was already too late.

Nowadays, I cull worthless images before I get home sometimes, but it’s faster, easier, and better when I use PhotoMechanic. To me, PhotoMechanic is worth its weight in gold. I think I’ve been using it “forever”, since I got my first decent digital cameras.

D850 captures 100-meg images? Ouch!!! That’s both great and scary. It’s one more reason why I don’t want to buy the new Leica M11, with a 60-meg sensor. I’m happy with 24 meg, from both my D780 and my M10. I guess I’m just stuck too much in the past. I’m jealous too!!!

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Aren’t you using raw lossless compression?
They are fully supported in PhotoLab and are of the same quality of uncompressed raw.
I’m a Nikon user since year 2000 and always use that compressed raw since without any issue.

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Personally I have never exceeded the values indicated in the Nikon table

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