A while back I read an article in FSM about digital photography and how they do their “beauty” shots. This is the article.
http://www.finescale.com/fsm/default.aspx?c=a&id=2485
I’m a novice when it comes to photography…point-and-shoot is my middle name and I always was frustrated with taking photos with a digital camera because I could never quite get the photos to look like the real thing. And then, after reading the article above, it dawned on me…the camera doesn’t see things the way human eyes do…it sees much, much more, but it’s dependent on having enough light to see it all and turn it into little tiny pixels. So I did a test to see if I could make it work. I’ll never own one of their fancy professional grade Ferrari cameras, but I wanted to see what my little Yugo of a camera could do…so I upgraded my lighting area just a bit.
Camera is a no-frills digital camera by Olympus (it doesn’t even have a viewfinder, just an LCD screen. :lol:) Their FE-110 model, rated at 5 Megapixels. I set the camera on its highest resolution setting, photos start out at 2560x1920 and are right at about 1 MB in size each. I then upload them to my PC and edit them using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX just because it’s a program I’m used to using more than anything else. :-# I’m sure there are better editing programs out there, but this is one I’ve had for a while so it does the job. Photos are then edited down to 800x600 for smaller size and easier upload to the 'net since that’s the main reason I take photos. So here’s the test using that setup…test subject is a 1/35 Panzerjager I build because it’s small but got a lot of detail and I wanted to test the camera’s ability to pick it up under these conditions.
Here’s the lab being used. Blue packground is just posterboard, white base is foamboard. 2 black lamps are incandescents with 60w bulbs in each, other two desk lamps are halogens also using 50w bulbs.
First shot, no lighting or flash except normal indoor lighting with the room bulb of 100w I think incandescent (my wife likes lots of light, so all the rooms have bright incandescents to begin with. :D). This shot is unedited except for size. The camera is clearly struggling and doing it’s best but it’s not great.
Run through the editing software which also digitally tries to correct using the Auto Adjust for what the camera captured vs. what it actually “saw”. This isn’t always perfect, sometimes the software will try to “guess” the ratios and it doesn’t always turn out well.
That was ok, but a lot of the detail is still soft and a lot of shadows obscure things. So let’s turn on the lights…but only the front two…adding another 120w of light to the equation.
Better, but still not perfect. Now a lot of the back surfaces are thrown into shadow, so we’ll run it through the edit and see what it can do.
It tries…but there’s still this cone of shadow behind the model that needs help…so let’s turn on the other two lights and another 100w of light but this time from the rear quarters.
Shadows are gone from the back and more detail is now visible…but the overall tone of the photo is still muted, so let’s run it through the edit software.
Better, but due to the distance of the subject away from the camera, some of the finer detail is still being lost. Normally I would crop the photo down so there isn’t so much dead space but to avoid that in the first place, position the subject so that it “fills” the camera space as much as possible to begin with. What the camera takes as the “first” picture is going to be the best, sharpest image you’re going to get…after that the changes in the editing will tend to loose detail/sharpness depending on how much is done to it.
Now for the question…can you have too much light? The answer is yes…but…it depends on where it’s coming from.
Just for kicks because I’m always trying to improve the lighting arrangement…I went to Lowe’s today and picked up 4 halogen spots…2 that are 10w, 2 that are 20w, and have been playing around with them to see how they work with the existing lights.
I decided to go with the 20w and shifted their arrangement slightly.
Here’s the unedited version of a couple of shots vs. their edited counterparts…which ones show up better in terms of lighting on your monitor?
Unedited:
Edited:
Unedited:
Edited:
