Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2008/09/02

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Subject: [Leica] About to take M8 plunge - but worried about blown highlights...
From: dlridings at gmail.com (Daniel Ridings)
Date: Tue Sep 2 02:42:40 2008
References: <200809020336.AWF59279@rg4.comporium.net> <93642647159018605813317929417096646172-Webmail2@me.com>

I can see your point, though the jpgs I looked at on the site you
mentioned (I could only look at the embedded jpgs) would have passed
my criteria (but I don't take much color, so I'm just a hack).

Your best bet sounds like it would be to take a digital card into a
shop that has an M8 and ask them to let you do some test shots. I
suspect that only you can judge the results.

If I remember correctly Lightroom or at least Photoshop has some tools
to help you pull some details out of the extreme highlights. But in
general, I'd compare digital capture to color transparencies, not to
color negative films.

There are so many benefits of digital over color negative films that
even if I'd have to sacrifice one thing on my wish-list, there are so
many others that are so much easier to deal with than they are in film
(color temperature ... consistency across a whole shoot in a social
situation, for example) that I'd still opt for digital when it comes
to color.

This from a die-hard film addict.

Daniel

On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 11:10 AM, Wyndham Pulman-Jones <simonpj@mac.com> 
wrote:
> The one thing that has held me back from buying an M8 is my dislike of the 
> look of blown highlights in digital photos. Almost all of my shooting is 
> of people interacting in social and working situations - and I always 
> expose by taking incident readings for people's faces and letting 
> everything else fall where it may. This frequently means that lighter 
> exteriors visible through windows or doors are overexposed - but when 
> using fast colour negative film there is almost always some tone and 
> character to the overexposed area. The same also applies to highlights on 
> people's hair when strongly backlit.
>
> When I have used digital (Epson RD-1, Canon 1Ds) I have not liked the 
> totally white blown out highlights, fringed with un-natural looking 
> chromatic aberation, that often result from shooting in this way (when you 
> are not able to worry about exposinig for areas of the photo not carrying 
> the narrative interest, which might end up significantly overexposed.)
>
> Does the M8 suffer from this just as much as any other digital camera? If 
> so, what's the best technique for stopping those 'outside the scene' 
> highlights from blowing out? Or is it just not possible with the M8 to 
> 'set and forget' exposure in the way that you can with incident metering 
> for the latitude of negative film?
>
> (I found some M8 DNG samples which show totally blown out 'through the 
> window' highlights which have the digital look that just doesn't look 
> right to me: http://rpo.eranet.tv/)
>
> Thanks,
>
> Simon.
> Cambridge, UK.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
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>

Replies: Reply from jayanand at gmail.com (Jayanand Govindaraj) ([Leica] About to take M8 plunge - but worried about blown highlights...)
In reply to: Message from images at comporium.net (Tina Manley) ([Leica] IMG: Playing with Fire)
Message from simonpj at mac.com (Wyndham Pulman-Jones) ([Leica] About to take M8 plunge - but worried about blown highlights...)