Mikes Digital Printing Blog

Canon EOS 400D Digital Rebel

2007-09-14T04:54:00.000-07:00

This is not a technical review, there are lots of people out there better equipped to do that than am I.

First impressions, great. Handles nicely. has a BIG screen. Most controls are logical and easy to find.

The first thing I did was to get rid of the jpegs. Selected RAW only.
Made sure that it was embedding Adobe RGB. It defaults to sRGB, Mikey Mouse stuff.
Set a picture style or two. The camera tends to underexpose. A 1 stop increase in your style deals nicely with that and leaves little need for recovery in Camera Raw processing. A little increase in saturation also seems to pay dividends in later processing. Dump all camera software sharpening, Photoshop does it better. Picture Styles seem to apply to the P, AV and TV settings only.

Problems.
Fill-in flash is a nightmare in strong daylight. Would dearly love to hear from anyone who can get this to work.
I use polarising filters a lot (landscapes). The exposure and auto focus can both get completely confused by a polarising filter. Exposure is always at least a stop under and three identical pushes of the button produce three different exposures (AV setting) and I can see the focus "hunting" but seeming to settle at random. The only reliable method of controlling this is to disable autofocus (not a problem with landscapes on a tripod) then get an exposure without the filter and set a manual exposure that compensates for the filter. Tedious!

Image quality is just stunning. Clean sharp saturated, no artifacts.

Then we get to the processing :-(

Canon software - forget it. I use the Canon Image Browser as a quick way of sorting out the duplicates that I am going to dump. Bear in mind that Image Browser makes a quick and cheap jpeg preview, your images will not look sharp when zoomed in Image Browser.

Photoshop Camera Raw. Oh Boy! Is this powerful. Also complicated. Suggest you read lots about this before you even start. Try these -
http://luminous-landscape.com/reviews/software/camera-raw.shtml
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/article_pages/why_use_raw.html
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/raw_tips.mspx
http://photoshopnews.com/2007/05/31/about-camera-raw-41/

Never, never, ever throw out or modify the original Raw file, you are going to get better at this and will want to go back and start all over again! I am on my third time around with some images.

Once I can get my brain around all of this I will post a separate review.

OK now the lenses. Both the 18 -55 and the 17 - 300 exhibit all the qualities one would expedt from Canon. Both however were supplied without a lens hood, cheapscates. The longer end of the 70 - 300 is not for anyone who had a couple of drinks too many the night before. It is very light and almost impossible to hold still. use a tripod.
The 10 - 20mm Sigma is a different kettle of fish. It did come with a lens hood but this drops off far too easily. Also when the lens hood is fitted it is not possible to fit a polarising filter, A screw thread lenshood would be better even if it assumes that users will line it up correctly. The lens is sharp and clean but the distortion below 14mm is frankly not acceptable regardless of the short focal length.

OK, that's it for now. So far very impressed or at least more impressed than I expected to be!

The new kit!

2007-09-14T04:42:00.000-07:00

Never one to do things by half, here is my new digital setup.

Canon EOS 400D (the Digital Rebel in USA)
Canon 18 - 55mm lens
Canon 75 - 300mm lens
Sigma 10 - 20mm lens

I will post a review of this lot separately.

Apple iMac Intel 24" fully loaded.
Photoshop CS3
No need for a review of these, they are perfect.

Epson Stylus Photo R2400
Fitted with the Lyson continuous ink system
There will be a review of this.

Epson Perfection V750 Pro Scanner
Also to be reviewed.

Check back soon.

Mike

First post - Introduction

2006-07-25T04:23:00.000-07:00

As you will have seen from my web site, my background is in photography and my preference is for black and white. I no longer have the resources or energy for traditional silver print making so now make all my prints with inkjet printers. The results have never matched the quality of silver prints.

My first digital efforts involved scanning black and white negatives. Results were terrible, no scanner that I could reasonably afford (under £2000) could manage the tonal range, especially in the shadow areas of the subject. The scanners I tried claimed a D range of 3.8 to 4.0 but I doubt that this was achieved in reality.

So, on to an alternative, I made very good 10 x 8 glossy silver prints and scanned those. Much better, Epson photo scanners were able to capture the full range of the print. Then came the next problem, the digital print.

My first quality printer was an Epson 2000P, very good but expensive to run. It produced fine colour results and would produce reasonable black and white prints (black ink only) from undemanding subjects. Give it extensive rich shadows and it failed miserably, completely blocking deep shadow and posterising near deep shadows. Unfortunately Epson declined to write Mac OSX drivers for the 2000P so it is now a paperweight!

This blog will track my further efforts to get good digital prints from my archive of silver negatives but I feel that future images will have to start with a digital camera so lots to find out. Early experiments with a Canon have been interesting.