Photography in simple English

[eastwestdivide]

Yes, cheers for the explanation. I was just trying a bit of humour (never a great idea) to avoid too much detailed tech discussion in a thread where the OP was asking for basic advice on how to make their pictures sharp.

ewd
MBA (master of b**gger all)
ASSQ (asker of seemingly-stupid questions)

 

[PaxVobiscum]

Sorry, but the general gist is understandable, isn't it?

To put a simple term to it, you have a continuous scale of colour and light that is put into neat little slots by your camera when you take the picture, if you use photoshop, you pull it out of them slots onto a near continuous scale, if you change things to make a photo look better, it won't fit into the slots again when you come to save it, and you get changes to colour definition that can sometimes be noticed, known as quantization errors?

That better?

Nym BEng MIET AMIMechE...

Not really.

How about "rubbish in = rubbish out"?

1. There has to be enough information there - in the form of a correctly focussed and exposed image - to begin with (as has been said).

2. It also needs to stored in a (relatively) uncompressed format so that information is not thrown away.

The same principle of being unable to produce a silk purse from a sow's ear also applies in digital video and audio. The internet forums for all of these specialities are full of people asking what they can do to improve poor originals, and other people telling them how they could should have done it right to start with.

Detailed knowledge of digital sampling theory is required to design and build hardware and software but not to use either.

 

[Track Basher]

I thought this was photography in simple English not an advanced PhD course.

Instamatic 110 anyone. Point and click.

 

[JohnB57]

I thought this was photography in simple English not an advanced PhD course.

Instamatic 110 anyone. Point and click.

The problem is that if someone has a misconception about something, it's not enough just to say "you're wrong". You have to go on and explain why, which involves getting more jargony.

Amazingly, you can still get 110 film (and other elderly formats) processed by the way.

 

[Nym]

The problem is that if someone has a misconception about something, it's not enough just to say "you're wrong". You have to go on and explain why, which involves getting more jargony.

Amazingly, you can still get 110 film (and other elderly formats) processed by the way.

Indeed, you'll usually get some 'expert' coming in if you just say, "That's wrong." or "That's a bad idea." So it's best to actually explain it, even if only 1% of readers understand it, you can always google the big words.

 

[GB]

Wrong or right I don't think anyone here has to worry about "quantization errors" when doing a bit of post processing.

Post processing is as much a part of photography as the actual taking of the picture its self and can provide stunning results. Though as already said, it can't fix some issues.

 

[JohnB57]

Wrong or right I don't think anyone here has to worry about "quantization errors" when doing a bit of post processing.

Post processing is as much a part of photography as the actual taking of the picture its self and can provide stunning results. Though as already said, it can't fix some issues.

Agree 100%. The point I was making was about shooting raw and changing "camera settings" in PP. The critical camera settings are the ones that you can't correct to any meaningful extent in post. The ones that can be changed generally duplicate those that convert the raw file to jpeg in camera for review and "SOC" purposes.

There was a story circulating recently from the US where a newish pro photographer shot a full wedding in manual, because she'd been told it was better. All she did was to move the dial to "M" without changing the exposure settings, because she thought that could be done in post...