Stuart Richardson;425 wrote: Thanks for the work and the samples Josh. It was nice to see your sharpening technique as well. It’s funny how different they can be. For example, with the M9 (and probably eventually the S2) I tend to rely on high masking, minimal radius and detail, but a higher level on the sharpening slider. It’s more of an edge sharpening effect than overall sharpening, as the files themselves are already very sharp. Your work with luminance noise reduction has also led me to consider trying it — in the past I have avoided it because I usually feel like the trade off in detail loss is not worth the lower noise, but here it seems to be working very well. I will say too, that the S2 at a virtual 800 looks brilliant.
Stuart,
We arrived at these sharpening settings based on recommendations from a senior developer at Adobe and our own in-house testing. He works in the Lightroom team and is responsible for optimizing processing for the S2 and M9. In Lightroom 3, the sharpening algorithms were revised so. Basically, the new sharpening is a blend of Unsharp Mask (edge sharpening) and Smart Sharpen (deconvolution sharpening). If the detail slider is at 0, the algorithm uses 100% Unsharp Mask. If the detail slider is at 100, 100% Smart Sharpen is used. At a setting of 50, there is a 50/50 split. You get the idea. This is why we use a setting of 60-70 for detail.
I am interested in another situation though — long exposure. You did some very nice long-exposure shots with the 350mm Superachromat. How do you find the S2 does in terms of noise in long exposure? I think the M9 did a rather nice job, but it would be great if the S2 could do it as well. I would be more likely to use the S2 in a long exposure situation than in a low-light handheld situation (though it is nice to have the capability).
What is the upper limit of the S2 now? I know it was recently lengthened…
I’m sure we will be doing some long exposure testing in due course. I have personally had excellent results with shots up to 32 seconds (which is all I ever seem to need).
Long exposure time was increased in a previous firmware update from 32 seconds to 126 seconds.
David
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