Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack_Flesher
Yep. The M8 DNG is very sensitive to over-exposure because of the "magic" (or more accurately the cheating and trickery) Leica chose to impart to the 8-bit DNG compression. It rears it's ugliness most for me in too little latitude in the high-midtones/low-highlights generating excessive banding there with sometimes just moderate adjustments. Under-exposing by 1/3 stop helps a lot without unduly compromising shadow detail.
Cheers,
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Yes--there is a ton of shadow detail to compensate with, so underexposing in hard light--unless you want blown highlights--is what I do too.
But what I also find in hard light (because these are all hard light examples) with the M8 is that you can usefully use a quarter tone curve in the upper mid and lower mid quadrants in the RAW converter (the opposite of an S curve) to lower contrast and preserve detail without messing colour (keep the midtones around the middle).
This is crucial to me; you can always add back contrast when printing (for your output device).
FWIW, this is precisely the opposite of the curve I'd use for traditional Canons (though again this works very well for the 1ds2 / 1d2 where people think they have no upper detail). The detail is there, but most profiles / gamma corrections from RAW converters just blow it away
On the Mac C1, you can even draw individual RGB corrections and save them then re-apply to all the images (or create a profile if you're using C1 Pro).
BTW--the speculars in the water look ok to me... if you wanted them different there are a couple of ways to get them there--but you'd get the same with a Canon... (and sometimes worse, depending on the lens).