Virgin river reflection

This is a scene I found last weekend in the Virgin river in Zion National Park. The yellow color is a reflection of fall color on trees around the river. I have another image that at some point I'll post that shows the entire scene. I just liked the abstract shapes in this detail.

Golden waterfall

I went with my friend Dave shooting around Zion. We shot an enormous amount of images that I have to somehow find the time to put together. I'd like to show you at least one image that I put together in my hotelroom at night. This is a small waterfall that Dave had found a few years ago along the Taylor Creek trail. The water is reflecting the rising sun on an opposing mountain and is getting blurred by the long shutter. The color was indeed outerworldy.



As always this is an image assembled from multiple images, so it is very high resolution. The detail in the original is amazing. There will be much more to follow as I can see a gluttony of amazing images ripening in my Lightroom Library.

Assembling a high res image

I was playing with Lightroom 3 beta and discovered that you can now set the background color in a print layout. Excellent! Also, I just happened to generate the following little grid of images that make up a larger panorama. I thought this looked quite nice actually.


I develop these images very flat on purpose to enable better panoramic stitching.

Assembled using hugin and after doing some post treatment just in Lightroom this becomes the following.

This image is 7500x9930 pixels. I have this in a gallery over here, where you can order prints from it. Because of its very high resolution, you can print this image extremely large without loss of quality.
As I promised earlier, when I have time I'll write a little tutorial on how you can do this.

EDIT: playing with the images in LR 3.0 beta, I created the following. This is the top middle image in the collage above but edited individually. This is using the Adobe Standard profile and very modest edits (mostly the blacks and a small amount of added vibrance. I sometimes find such images in my sets that were unintentionally composed quite well.

More detail

Warning: extreme pixelpeeping alert! You are not going to see any difference if you don't print extremely large.

Now I've give you the disclaimer, I want to say that I am really quite impressed with the new demosaic in Lightroom. I posted one example before where you could see the subtle effect that made the LR 3 images look more natural and allow for larger prints. Here is another example where instead of using the same sharpening settings, I tried to optimize both the LR 2 and the LR 3 version. It is not possible to get the LR 2 version to show anywhere near as much detail as the LR 3 version. The LR 3 version also looks far more natural and less fake. Surprisingly, you can even see the effect a little bit in the scaled down version that I use below as a placeholder. Full-res version in the link where you can really see the difference.



Of course, the left is LR 2 and the right LR 3

Edit: David Naylor comes to very similar conclusions on his blog.

Edit 2: This is the lower right corner of a frame shot using the ultracheap Nikon 18-55 mm kit lens. Parameters: Nikon D300, 18-55mm f3.5-5.6, ISO 200, f8, 1/60 s, handheld. It always amazes me how sharp this cheapo lens can be.

Lightroom 3 new demosaic

It appears the new LR 3 beta includes a new demosaic algorithm and sharpening algorithm. The amount of detail you can extract from the images has gone up by leaps and bounds. You can also go much farther in sharpening than before without the image starting to look like a waterpainting. One nice thing too is that you can also inside LR 3 beta, select the old rendering engine to directly compare. The option is in Develop in the Settings menu, submenu "Process Version". Below is a quick example of the huge difference in detail. This is a scree slope somewhere in Rocky Mountain National Park, so lots and lots of fine detail. The image below shows the LR 2 version. Mouseover for LR 3. You might have to wait a few seconds for the second version to load. Also note that since these are medium-high quality jpegs, some detail is lost in the jpeg conversion.



When I have some time, I'll provide some more analysis. For now, it is looking very very good.

UPDATE: The above image but scaled to 200% Here you see that the new algorithm will really help very large prints (the full image below would correspond to a print of 4x6 feet!. The mouseover version (LR 3) is obviously far better as it doesn't show the weird watercolor effect that you can often get in LR 2.



Here's another example.

Lightroom 3 beta

All over the web and finally repeated here (sorry had other stuff to do then post to my blog ;-) ). Check it out.

Mamiya releases new medium format digital camera

And it is relatively affordable: See here. A 22 MP one for about 10k$ and a 28 MP one for 15k$. These are very nice prices compared to the competition in this format. The cameras are compatible with all Mamiya AF lenses of which there are many floating around on ebay, craigslist and of course keh.com. It appears that, like the Leica M9, these cameras output a file format that makes them work directly with Lightroom and other such programs without any updates needed. That is great news and more camera manufacturers should listen to their costumers that generally do not want to be locked into the camera manufacturer's generally crappy software (are you listening Nikon and Canon?). DNG is a great choice for such a file format.