Just wondering? Can we have a thread like this, or will it be vaped if it gets too long and boring? Simply put, I'd like to share a few D70 thoughts and also gain some tips from the SN D70/D-SLR experts :)

Also we could share some snide piccy's 'not worthy' of the SN photo comp thread and get some settings and pre/post processing advice to muck about with :D

I'm using Photoshop CS atm to process RAW, and desperately in need of help with some of its more advanced techniques ;)


Cheers

J

(I'll not be about till late next week but fire away lads :D)

not sure of the raw thing- i have taken loads of shots in Jpeg fine and cant see why i'd need anything else?

Tiggs, supposidly shooting in RAW lets you alter the original pic time and time again without losing anything in terms of the original quality, whereas altering any JPEG loses you quality every time you process it.

J

but raw is HUGE!

even on my 1 gig card i dont bother!

i have a pic i took with my 4 Megpix point and shoot- i played with the jpeg and got it printed 10" by 12" and its perfect. unless you are blowing up to a poster i wonder what the REAL difference is?

Haven't shot anything but RAW since the day I bought my camera. But there again, mine is a Canon 10D. You N*k*n D70 boys should stick to JPEGs, or maybe GIF would be safer. ;) ;)

Seriously, you can do an awful lot processing to RAW images, usually something like -+ 2 stops of exposure control, colour temperature control, bring them into PS in 16-bit (per channel) mode and do your additional processing there for as long as you can at 16-bit level. Quality difference between that and a JPEG of the same thing can be huge, especially if you plan to print yourself.

Cheers

Ian

It's not just about compression.

With RAW and Nikon Capture software you can alter white balance and exposure settings etc. after taking the picture. Couple this with the fact that you have no compression and you can see the advantage.

Now factor in that in the future we may have tools better than Photoshop in terms of colour resolution etc. and you can see why many pros store their images in RAW format - several years down the line with better software they will be able to 'redevelop' their old pics whereas with JPEG a lot of info is already lost.

Agreed though that if you're happy just sanpping away then JPEG Fine maybe the best compromise.

tiggers.

EDIT: That'll teach me not to press the reply button - cross post with IWatkins - still at least we're both saying the same thing :D

you pic geeks :) just take a decent picture in the first place!

you pic geeks :) just take a decent picture in the first place!

And that is the key to it all really isn't it? ;)

so the only way to open a NEF is with nikon capture?

With RAW on the D70 I seem to get about 90 pics per 512 cf, it says 45 pics max but I get over 80 np, I guess this is Nikons guesstimate for RAW :)

So, as I have two 512 mem cards this should give me 180 pics in RAW, surely this is enough for a few days shooting along with uploding them to my lappy and deleting dross?

Photoshop CS can process NEF's btw

so the only way to open a NEF is with nikon capture?

No there are various Photoshop plug ins for NEF/RAW images available and all of them do things in different ways - some arguably better, some arguably worse.

And tis true that Photoshop now natively supports NEF/RAW images although I still like playing with them in Nikon Capture first. To be honest though a lot of it is personal preference.

Have a dig on the DP Review Forums (http://www.dpreview.com/forums) as there's lots of information on there.You don't have to change the way you do anything if you're happy with it, but it's worth finding out others experiences and recommendations.

tiggers.

my 1 gig card shows just 90 images on RAW- is this just a guess then???

Nope - that's about right - although it's never 100% accurate as it depends on the type of images being taken as to exactly how much space they occupy.

tiggers.

my 1 gig card shows just 90 images on RAW- is this just a guess then???

As I said earlier, yes it is only a guess, and I get roughly 90 RAW images from my 512 cards. I first read about this on the Nikon D70 forum.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1034

my 1 gig card shows just 90 images on RAW- is this just a guess then???

Yes I never fail to get much less than 150 on my 1gb, and 80-90 on a 512.

I never shoot in anything but raw. Nikon capture is like having a dark room on your pc, and treating the raw files like negatives.

The estimate of RAW images is horribly wrong. The D70 uses compression (shock horror, it's lossy too!) on its NEF files, and the engineers took the size calculations to be based on uncompressed NEFs.

BTW, has everyone upgraded their firmware then? :)

I'm not sure about NEFs yet. I played briefly with NC and NEFs yesterday, and must admit to liking the flexibility, but am not sure if I really want to keep yet another version of my pics on the hard disk :D

Cheers,
Nick.

[QUOTE=chiark]BTW, has everyone upgraded their firmware then? :)[QUOTE]

Not have a chance yet, and given that I have no problems with mine I am a little wary. What does it change?

The estimate of RAW images is horribly wrong. The D70 uses compression (shock horror, it's lossy too!) on its NEF files, and the engineers took the size calculations to be based on uncompressed NEFs.

Ah! Well then I stand corrected - I should have remembered we were talking about a budget DSLR and not the real thing ;)

What is the present firmware for the D70? I think mines is showing 1.2. I had a look on Nikons site but couldnt find any firmware updates, could someone post the link.

There's two lumps of firmware in your camera - A and B. I think the latest is 1.02 for A and 1.01 for B, but that might be the wrong way around. The firmware and instructions are on Nikon's support site, and you need to register.

http://nikoneurope-en.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nikoneurope_en.cfg/php/enduser/std_alp.php

It sorts out a few bugs, gets rid of colour shifts left to right on pictures at stupidly high shutter speeds, corrects the functioning of Auto ISO with flash. At least, that's what Nikon is admitting that it does. There's speculation that it does a bit more, but no-one knows for sure. Some people claim that their images are sharper out of the camera with new firmware, but that could just be placebo effect - especially as there's no way to revert back to the old firmware ;)

The compression of NEFs isn't an issue quality-wise IMHO. I think it uses 12 bit rather than 16 bit, and concentrates the extra bits in the places they're needed most. There were rumours that a firmware upgrade in the future would give full uncompressed NEFs for the truly anal retentive.

Now, colour management on your PC... Anyone got any wonderful tips for that? I'm using photoshop, and my PC regularly gets its knickers in a knot due to the adobe gamma loader and the graphics card's own colour management software.

BTW, tips: DON'T FORGET TO TURN YOUR ISO BACK TO 200 WHEN YOU MOVE FROM SHOOTING IN LOW LIGHT AT ISO 800/1600 AND WANDER OUTSIDE! I've done this a couple of times now, and still I don't learn...

Also, get a book on photography. I like Michael Langford's "Basic Photography", although his section on digital image manipulation is comically laughable: "A modem is needed to translate analogue images into digital" etc.

Also also, get Thom Hogan's ebook. It's quite wordy on the basics, but it is essential to understand the workings of your camera. However, it doesn't tell you how to take good photos - that's where the Basic Photography book and the Thom Hogan book work so well together.

Also also also, pick up Amateur Photographer and have a flick through that each week. There's some really good stuff in there tip-wise and inspiration-wise, plus there's loads of used stuff for sale listed in there...

Also also also also, use Nikon View 6 rather than the frankly appalling PictureProject that's bundled with the D70 in the UK. It's downloadable from the link above.

I'll shut up before I think of more :D

Tiggs, supposidly shooting in RAW lets you alter the original pic time and time again without losing anything in terms of the original quality, whereas altering any JPEG loses you quality every time you process it.

J
I'm not a camera geek by any means ;) but jpeg will only lose quality if you save it with compression every time. Most decent editing software allows you to change the compression factor so once you have saved it once using compression to reduce the file size just make sure you no longer use compression to edit that file and no further quality will be lost.

Good advice from chiark there. No compression problems with the D2H - I can shoot raw compressed or uncompressed, with or without jpegs (3 compression settings for those) or in tif - but then again, I did pay a tad more money for the privilege ! Just to clarify for Nikon newbies - NEF is Nikon's "version" of RAW. The D2H firmware upgrade fixed auto WB problems and added some nice features to the zoom control and shooting/exposure menus.

I also recommend reading Bryan Patterson's "Learning to see creatively" and Michael Freeman's "The Image" for all your composition and creative seeing needs.

Also check out (I'm sure you have already) the Nikonians (http://www.nikonians.com) site as well as Rob Galbraith (http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/index.asp) and as mentioned above Thom Hogan (http://www.bythom.com/)

<wanders off to Borders to pick up Learning to see creatively...>

Chiark, another book which doesn't deal with photography per se but more to do with artistic vision, is "Picture This" by Molly Bang - might be a little hard to find but it's worth looking through it if you do. Hopefully I'll get a chance to put her and Patterson's principles to good use when I trot off to Corsica in a few days time :)

Now there's a name to conjure with: "Molly Bang".

Corsica? Fantastic place. Spent two weeks based in Calvi (http://www.camping-calvi.com/), and loved it. Did a 4 day walk from somewhere in the mountains to somewhere on the coast (specific, eh?), and it was good fun - Hellishly hot though, and carrying enough water was quite difficult. We soon got fed up of wandering through maquis, though. I was about the only person in a group of 20 that could speak French semi-decently, so I got lumbered with all the negotiations on food, etc...

Good grief, that was 12 years ago. I am getting old...
Enjoy!
Nick.

Glad to hear you enjoyed, many other people say the same things so I'm really looking forward to it. We're driving down in Mrs STi-Frenchie's RAV4 so getting up and down the mountains should be a bit easier than hiking - this old man wouldn't be able to hack a backpack full of gear :) Keeping the kids from fighting on the journey down might be a problem but I reckon a roll of gaffer tape and a threat should do the trick ! The temperatures are definitely starting to rise and there have been a few fires on the island in recent days...still as long as they don't block the sunsets eh? :) I picked up a touristy book yesterday and had a read through it - it looks like there is a lot to photograph and as we're driving down I can even pack a proper tripod instead of the table-top one I usually have to make do with on holidays. I'll report back on how it went...you never know, it might even entice folks to make the trip over for the WRC event in October !

Thanks for the info and great tip's chiark, I still cant see the firmware dl though and I have registered but I seem to have both 1.2 and 1.1 in the menu so I guess I'm OK. Regarding reverting to ISO 200 again, forgot this loads of times when I was wandering around Rome at night, just as well I was so anal I looked at the settings info and the histogram after just about every photo :)

Go to nikon's site, then log in, then select "answers", then filter by Digital SLR / D70. The 8th article (D70 Update 1.01 / 1.02 - Windows) has got the download. But you don't need it :D

Hmmm, ordered my D70 body last night, website said they were in stock. Ooooo, get it on saturday I thought!

Got a mail at lunchtime - sorry out of stock. 7-10 days.

Bummer!!!!

What am I going to do with my lenses when they arrive? Pretend? ;)


Geezer