Original poster: Vardan <vardan01@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Hi Again Dan, At 09:17 PM 9/15/2006, you wrote:
... Also, you mention color balance and all that jazz, but if you really want to be serious with these images, you REALLY do need to shoot RAW images and convert them to TIFF files using 16-bit linear mode. With RAW images, it doesn't matter what your color balance is as you can select this when you do the RAW conversion. Also, when shooting JPG you only get 8-bit of information vs. 12-bit. Of course, you could argue that that added resolution might not be that important when shooting a bright object like an arc. Dan
I tested the camera's 9MB TIFF images against the 500K JPG images. I pumped the brightness and contrast on the original picture. Then I subtracted a dark picture from a black exposure to eliminate noise and then pumped it.
The TIFF images looks like this: http://drsstc.com/~piranha/PIRANHA/pictures/TIFFtest.jpg And the JPG images like this. http://drsstc.com/~piranha/PIRANHA/pictures/JPGtest.jpgThe top left is the original image, the top right is the black exposure. The bottom left is the contrast pump and the bottom right is the subtraction and then the contrast pump. The images above are vastly reduced in size for download ease.
So the smaller images are not too bad given the "army I got". The smaller images are much easier to deal with so I will stick with them and only resort to the giant image if I really have to push it.
Happily, the camera is able to pull out a whole lot of "dark" information ;-)) So things are looking pretty good!! I tried the low light video camera and the still camera's enhanced pictures are just as good! ;-)) I did note that the black reference picture needs to be taken at the same settings as the good picture without turning the camera off. I think it resets during a power off so the noise does not line up right anymore.
Cheers,
Terry