Teen with Fedora--A Second 'First Look'

In my original post on  RAW Therapee's new noise reduction routines I had excellent results with the image of Charlotte under Lord Shiva but far worse results with some other images. The noise reduction part still worked but thick black vertical lines appeared in the converted.images.

Turns out the noise reduction algorithm broke the image into segments called tiles. It worked its noise reduction magic on each tile individually but sometimes the tiles didn't rejoin smoothly. A tricky and hard to find bug, judging from the number of posts that appeared in the forum while they were fixing the problem.

That bug has been mostly swatted--noise reduction still doesn't work on JPGs-- but with code change set 135 we can now test and work with RAW files.  ( found at http://www.visualbakery.com/RawTherapee/Downloads.aspx  )



ISO 6400  f8.0  1/25 sec  EV -0.7

This snap was taken at Old World Wisconsin in the back of a barn during a demonstration of 19th century cow milking.  The lighting wasn't insanely difficult but as you can see from the camera settings I was pushing my D7000 to get this shot.

So how did RT do when I tried to improve the image.

YUP!  RT noise reduction works,

The noisy image to the left is without any noise reduction, just a +0.7 exposure correction to compensate for the -0.7 correction I did in the camera to move the shutter speed up to 1/25 of a second. The NR settings of the much cleaner image on the left are shown below.

I adjusted the Chrominance slider first. Use a 400 % box on something with little detail like the girl's cheek. Find a setting where all the color speckles disappear and then add a bit more.  This slider works on the A and B LAB channels that only contain low resolution color information so you are not blurring detail. With my D7000 at ISO 6400 about 2/3 of the noise was chromatic so that was a no fiddling around adjustment. Nice

For the other two sliders I picked a region with fine detail, the wood grain on the 2x4, and adjusted them to match the detail in my conversion to the detail in the jpg out of the camera. The Luminance slider controls the strength of the noise reduction. The Luminance Detail slider sets the threshold on  another algorithm that does its best to seperate real detail from random noise.  In this image Luminance 70 and Luminance Detail 50 worked well.

So where are we at now.  The left top line profile is from a RT conversion with no noise reduction.

The one below that is from the camera's jpg where I used the D7000's normal noise reduction setting.  It also is very close to the noise I measured when I used RT's default settings.

The top right profile is from my detail preserving image.  And finally the insanely low noise ISO 6400 profile below it is from when I went all out with a Luminance of 90 and a Luminance Detail of 6 to see how low noise I could go.

How bad was that image.  When I displayed it side by side with my tuned image I didn't have to pixel peek hard to see I had lost detail.  But if I had emailed it to Fedora Girl I'm sure she wouldn't have screamed "WHERE IS MY DETAIL" and immediately sent it into the bit bucket. We RT users are after the very best quality but in this world drowning in imagery, I'm afraid most viewer don't notice.

So great job RT folks and especially Emil who designed the algorithms and did the coding.

Memorial day in McFarland

More as an experiment than anything else I shot this from the hip. Or more accurately from hanging down around the neck where I pointed my D7000 is the general direction of the girls and tapped the shutter while I was walking.  As soon as they passed, Charlotte's mother caught up with me and said quietly, "I hate to think about it, but those two are Charlotte in a couple year.  Cute, popular, and walking around with the latest high tech toys."

Charlotte now.  Her high tech toys are upstairs waiting to be unpacked. She moved into a new home in McFarland this weekend.  So how high tech is this kid? A few years back when she was five and three quarters, she sat me down and told me I needed a new computer with more bandwidth. Her online games were playing 'tooo tooo sloow.'  And if I also tossed in some Barbie dolls, she might let me babysit again.

End result--if she's not hogging the big screen TV downstairs, she is cycling between her Barbie cluttered bed/toy room and this computer.  Kids rule in this house.

Now a pairing of images:

The first one was a for-sure flickr post but I didn't know what to do with the second one.

A few days ago during  Half Price Books  20% off sale I picked up a copy of 'the photograph as contemporary art' , Charlotte Cotton, Thames&Hudson, world of art.  This morning I was reading Chapter 2 "Once upon a time." To quote: "This area of photography practice is often described as tableau or tableau-vivant photography, for pictorial narrative is concentrated into a single image, a stand-alone picture."

This image certainly isn't museum grade art (like some I've seen hanging in museums)  and pairing the two is sort of cheating.  They were, however, taken a few minutes apart.  First the popcorn girl, then across the street to Charlotte and her ice cream, and finally inside to check out the Historical Society's bake sale.  A sequence that was meant to be.

But, given this high tech world, I didn't want to embarrass the overweight girl in the unlikely but not impossible event she saw it.  She might even flickr mail me an enraged complaint.  (Which did happen a few years ago but that is another tale.)

So into the blog it goes.  Where I know she and anybody she knows will never see it.