Firts outing with D850

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floridafan

New member
spb_stan said:
These images are shaped but inspecting the small jpg first image showed the hard contrasty light generated a lot of pin-points specular light on each of the points of the scales. That can decrease the perception of detail. Detail is aplenty in each of those shot. The ISO on one of the last ones was up to 1000, which also robs detail. I downloaded the first one to look at more closely and backed off the contrast and saw an improvement in detail but the specular highlights are blown out so that data is gone. In such hard contrasty scenes, using the cool feature of the D850 "Highlight-weighted metering" could assure specular highlights are not blown.
These animals are slow enough moving to use lower shutter speed to be able to get deep enough of field and not lose detail in the dark areas. These sensors have about linear "iso'less" dynamic range degradation with sensitivity. That means every stop increase in ISO results in about 1 stop less dynamic range. One of the great features of the D850 is a low native ISO. If that image was shot at OSO 64 or 50 ISO the contrast would be better dealt with. That is 3 full stops less DR at 1000 ISO than ISO 64. That is the same as replacing the D850 and shooting that scene with a D90 at ISO 160, except the D90 at 160 has slightly better DR than the D850 at 1000. All the passion for high ISO by people looking for extremes of high ISO numbers seems to forget that there is no free lunch. In scenes like that she would do better to lower the ISO to 50 or 100 and sent the aperture for the depth of field desired and shutter for the slowest the movement of the subject allows and let the scene be captured underexposed, The noise level after boosting the exposure in Photoshop or Lightroom would be the same as if she just shot with higher ISO but with the advantage of no loss to blown highlights. Scenes like this broken shade really test the DR of a camera so a lot of attention to preserve DR should be used. Would she be happy shooting with a 10-year-old crop camera? That is one way of thinking about the loss of DR that happens they use higher than needed ISO. According to the data, the D850 has the same DR at 4000 ISO as a D1 at ISO 200. That was Nikon's first attempt at producing a digital camera 21 years ago.
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Thank you for your time and your effort reviewing my wifes photo's We both really appreciate it. She is completely self taught, so your analysis is so very welcome! Thank you again!
 
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Blade Canyon

Senior Member
spb_stan said:
In scenes like that she would do better to lower the ISO to 50 or 100 and sent the aperture for the depth of field desired and shutter for the slowest the movement of the subject allows and let the scene be captured underexposed, The noise level after boosting the exposure in Photoshop or Lightroom would be the same as if she just shot with higher ISO but with the advantage of no loss to blown highlights.
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Oh, boy, you're re-visiting an old argument that J-See used to make (and which I agreed with), but a lot of folks here would not agree that adjusting ISO in post is the same as changing it in the camera.
 
hark

hark

Administrator
Staff member
Super Mod
Chucktin said:
Highlight-Weighted metering? That's a new one on me.
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One time I set my D750 to highlight-weighted metering and used it during Worship. Big mistake for me! My ISO is quite high there--generally 5000 or 8000. Highlight-weighted metering prevents the highlights from clipping so the images get underexposed. There are bright lights in the Sanctuary that wind up influencing the meter so the first pic was underexposed WAY too much. I quickly changed back to center-weighted metering which is my preference.

It really depends upon your scene. If there are immensely bright lights in your scene, you probably won't want to use it--any dark areas will simply record as black. Otherwise, it might be a good option. It's better for those times when the dynamic range isn't so vast.
 
S

spb_stan

Senior Member
Blade Canyon said:
Oh, boy, you're re-visiting an old argument that J-See used to make (and which I agreed with), but a lot of folks here would not agree that adjusting ISO in post is the same as changing it in the camera.
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The naysayers were right...10 years ago... when the first ISO'less sensors were appearing. those are sensors which have a linear slope of noise plotted against ISO. Starting with the D90...to a degree and D7000 fully, all the Nikon cameras got such sensors except the D7100 which had good noise performance but it was not in a 1:1 noise to ISO degradation curve. It was a Hitachi sensor that had good performance did not follow the "setting the gain in post being the same as ISO set at exposure style noise. It sort of fell apart when pushing over 3 stops and noise and artifacts increased at a higher rate.. The PDR curves for the Z7 and probably the Z6 continue the ISO'Less plot that the D7000 started.
At one time, sensors really varied a lot in DR so a D3s was dramatically better than the field. Now improvements are harder to come by with all FF sensors getting close to the format's theoretical limits for FF sensors and any improvement is due to image processing tricks and magic, not the sensor. Some companies started undefeatable raw noise reduction (Pentax followed by Canon and now Sony is doing that. That process always robs detail particularly edge detail and contrast. A lot of cameras are coming with heavy RAW noise reduction that you can't turn off at high ISO To be crowned the low noise king represents a lot of added sales. That is the bragging rights that have little relation to image quality since the really high ISO performance is bad on all cameras so are regions of the ISO range that no one is ever going to use, hence no one will complain about the 203,000 ISO image has 3db 1:2 signal to noise ratio will never be used but the ISO values into the millions establishes the new high ISO king
 
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