New M262 disappointing - exposure problems

[Jeff S]

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For better understanding your camera, check out the FAQ if you haven't already....  http://www.l-camera-forum.com/topic/216580-leica-m8-m82-m9-m9p-mm-mtyp240-faqs-questions-with-answers/

 

And of course read your manual, especially the parts about the metering system.

 

For Lightroom, check out the free Adobe video tutorials from Julieanne Kost....she covers virtually all subjects (just Google).

 

If you prefer books on LR, those from Scott Kelby are good to start, and for reference.

 

Mostly, though, practice.  The M isn't for everyone, but the basics should not take long, especially if you understand the basics of exposure, metering, etc.

 

Jeff

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[ECohen]

SD card in the camera is 32MB when I switched from JPG Fine to DNG+JPG capacity dropped significantly.

 

However, I am now beginning to wonder if this is the 'kick in the pants' I need to switch to DNG and cast my reluctance and excuses aside.

 

I have just opened one of the few DNG files I took today in Photoshop Elements 14.

 

Having played around with some of the adjustments possible with one of the poorly exposed images I have managed to correct it quite easily.

 

I will download Lightroom from the Leica site in the morning, take some DNG photos and report back.  

 

John

 

"I am now beginning to wonder if this is the 'kick in the pants' I need to switch to DNG and cast my reluctance and excuses aside."  Yes it is! 

 

I feel your pain....really I do. When I went from the X to the M, I only shot Jpgs ...because It was easier and that was all I needed . If you search some of my past posts, you will see a very naive M user ...me, asking "Why the Ms Jpgs" are so bad. This is an amazing camera and I'm sure its right up your alley. Download LR and poke around. And get a bigger external hard drive....actually 2 (one for back up)  and start shooting compressed DNG

 

There is a new Lightroom  video course that is really....really good and covers everything you will need to get up to speed with Lightroom ,Storage and Backup  https://mattk.com/the-ultimate-lightroom-course-is-here/

 

Start learning Lightroom and this wonderful camera. In a very short period of time you will be looking to build a three lens kit.

 

I promise, if you love photography and I can tell you do ....you wont be sorry, you did a little extra work.

 

Also defiantly check out Thorsten Overgaard's M240 settings explained.....its a great way to start out

http://www.overgaard...Leica-M240.html

 

Take Care,

[250swb]

 

Trouble with DNG is that it takes up so much space on the memory card and hard disk - I

   

 

Reading down the thread it appears that I'm not the only one to read these few words and heard alarm bells ring.

 

Given the trivial amount of space a .dng file takes up on a modern hard drive I wonder if 'so much' doesn't also extend to 'too much' trouble to learn the camera, too much trouble to learn how to manipulate a .dng in post processing, and just generally too much trouble to meet the requirements of a high performance digital camera and lens?

 

From the posted pictures, and even if learning the metering modes is taken from the equation, I can't see why with a bit of post processing a .dng file couldn't produce a perfectly good photo (only a few refinements in exposure are needed, mostly by the photographer learning to point the meter at the right thing). But that may mean too much time in post processing, and although by now the confusion between 'digital photography' and 'instant photography' shouldn't exist, it still does for many people.

 

Maybe from his last post the OP has woken up, it seems so, but being a photographer is more than pointing a camera at something and expecting a picture to pop out at the other end of the process fully formed. Fingers crossed.

[jhluxton]

Reading down the thread it appears that I'm not the only one to read these few words and heard alarm bells ring.

 

Given the trivial amount of space a .dng file takes up on a modern hard drive I wonder if 'so much' doesn't also extend to 'too much' trouble to learn the camera, too much trouble to learn how to manipulate a .dng in post processing, and just generally too much trouble to meet the requirements of a high performance digital camera and lens?

 

Maybe from his last post the OP has woken up, it seems so, but being a photographer is more than pointing a camera at something and expecting a picture to pop out at the other end of the process fully formed. Fingers crossed.

 

Post processing has never been an issue.

 

Basically my way of working with JPGs has been to download from camera - delete imperfect / duplicate images and then bulk rename using Faststone image viewer into my pattern file numbering based on year and image number say L2016_xxxx .

 

After that any files I am going to use / or upload to the web would be adjusted in Photoshop Elements and perhaps further adjusted in PicMonkey for SmugMug or Aviary for Flickr.

It has never been a case of snap, download and that's it - so not quite "Snappy Snaps" as someone described it I already put quite a bit of extra time into images.  

 

What I think has happened with me is that having been into digital imaging since 2000 when I bought the Fuji-Leica Digilux Zoom I developed a way of working starting at the beginning of 2001 - download the images which would always be taken in the best quality JPG compression and file them based on year, subject , month taken.

 

This has worked for me up to now.

 

There was no DNG when i started hence I never moved with the technology and ways of doing things.

 

When the smaller Leica's started to feature DNG the larger file size and the need to change an established way of working appeared to be a hassle as well as using a format which produced much larger file sizes.

 

I think what is going to have to happen is that I swap to DNG with the other cameras as well for consistency.

 

Anyway off to download Lightroom  

 

John

[Manoleica]

Hi, I'm not sure if you use a Mac or PC.. I'll let you into a little secret, if you are using jpeg the basic PP editors are great as part of the PP learning process.. Lightroom can be intimidating, although admittedly the results are outstanding... what I found helped when I got my M-P 240 Safari:- a few hand written notes on my settings, take 10-15 shots then PP.. you can then refer to your notes to see which settings suit you..

Out of the bag, my default settings:- Fine jpeg, auto ISO, Classic, -3EV, +1 Sharpness for color & B&W.. Auto shutter, F5.6...hyper focus.. Chimp the results and adjust to your requirements.. L

[LocalHero1953]

My comment on Snappy Snaps wasn't an adverse comment on your particular approach to your images (sorry if it came across that way) but to illustrate the difference between compressed formats, like jpg, and raw. Your journey is the same as mine, even down to the use of Praktica in the 70s (it fell apart after 3 months in dusty Somalia). I got a Leica M9 in 2011 and switched to raw, at the same time as starting with Lightroom (with the Leica deal, sadly no longer available). I found that badly exposed images that were unrecoverable as jpgs, were perfectly usable as dngs, because the latter contain more information. I also shot in manual exposure mode most of the time - I didn't really start using auto exposure till I got the M240 a few years later, by which time I knew how the metering behaved.

 

I see no reason to think the M262 is not for you. If you're committed to photography, rangefinders and Leica IQ, then you're just at the start of an interesting journey.

[otto.f]

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Prank - certainly not.

 

DNGs take over twice the space of a JPG and I have always preferred shooting JPGs.

 

You are telling us you bought an M to just work with jpeg's? Stick to your X1 then. It's fast and lightweight. Why carry the heavy M-system if you're not interested in RAW? You seem to work for digital end-products mostly and hardly for printing? Stick to the X1 too.

 

I happened to try out the M262 yesterday and I was pleased to see that the images looked quite dark on the LCD-screen. I hate worn-out highlights. When I came home and loaded the images in CaptureOne, they looked precisely right.

[otto.f]

This is an UNPROCESSED JPEG from a DNG straight out of the camera - it looks terrible BUT there is an image hiding in there!

 

This is the M262 and 21mm Elmar for a project on the de-industrialisation of my hometown.

It is quite common that wide-angle captures are a bit darker because they often happen to have a lot of sky in them

[jhluxton]

I have just been playing around with LR for a few minutes with poor file.

 

 

First attempt at Lightroom

 

 

Much improved - only a quick "tweak" but it now looks much as it should be.

 

One concern I have having done this LR appears  to loose the original in camera creation date in output JPGs which is a bit disappointing and from googling this appears to be a common query to which there doesn't appear to be a solution. 

 

I am now developing in my mind a way of structuring my collection of DNGs and JPGs - put the processed JPGs in a subfolder to the DNGs.

 

The last 48 hours have been a bit of a shock to the system - but then I think my approach needed shaking up. 

 

I am a much happier person than I was last night!

 

John

[ECohen]

I have just been playing around with LR for a few minutes with poor file.

 

 

First attempt at Lightroom

 

 

Much improved - only a quick "tweak" but it now looks much as it should be.

 

One concern I have having done this LR appears  to loose the original in camera creation date in output JPGs which is a bit disappointing and from googling this appears to be a common query to which there doesn't appear to be a solution. 

 

I am now developing in my mind a way of structuring my collection of DNGs and JPGs - put the processed JPGs in a subfolder to the DNGs.

 

The last 48 hours have been a bit of a shock to the system - but then I think my approach needed shaking up. 

 

I am a much happier person than I was last night!

 

John

 

So what don't you like about your camera now?  Two minutes and you got it. 

Check out the LR course I recommended. Since your just starting out with LR I think you will get a lot out of it.  It covers everything .

Nice train's ;-)

[jhluxton]

There you go John - you sorted it with a bit of work in Lightroom your files look MUCH better!!

 

 

Can I just say thanks to all you guys who have had the patience to set me off in the right direction much appreciated.

 

Still a lot to learn with LR but in the past couple of hours I have learnt a lot and have finally entered the second decade of the 21st Century when it comes to handling image files rather than being routed in the first year of the Milennium!

 

At least I now know my much hankered after camera is not a "lemon" after all  - it was just the operator who was rooted in the past!     

 

John

[LocalHero1953]

 

In Lightroom use the Fill Light slider to recover the shadows and then adjust exposure and contrast to suit - on my setup and every Leica M digital that I have used I find the colours to be a bit Cyan BUT again they are very easy to recover.

 

 

 

I suspect you are using an old version of LR - for some versions now, the sliders have been Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks. I don't know if they do things different from the old versions, but I find the terminology more intuitive (of course YMMV).

[a.noctilux]

John,

 

M 262 is fantastic if you use DNG.

 

As I'm lazy and wish to use as simple as possible, I don't pass much time in PP but it's fun to do so.

M262 dng files have big possibility to recover as I like.

 

Here an example of just I have done few minutes ago:

 

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dng file from M262 + MATE

 

 

And just 30 seconds of PP , in Faststone Image Viewer, the result is far better if not perfect

 

 

Regards,

Arnaud

[Tailwagger]

Reading down the thread it appears that I'm not the only one to read these few words and heard alarm bells ring.

 

Given the trivial amount of space a .dng file takes up on a modern hard drive I wonder if 'so much' doesn't also extend to 'too much' trouble to learn the camera, too much trouble to learn how to manipulate a .dng in post processing, and just generally too much trouble to meet the requirements of a high performance digital camera and lens?

 

From the posted pictures, and even if learning the metering modes is taken from the equation, I can't see why with a bit of post processing a .dng file couldn't produce a perfectly good photo (only a few refinements in exposure are needed, mostly by the photographer learning to point the meter at the right thing). But that may mean too much time in post processing, and although by now the confusion between 'digital photography' and 'instant photography' shouldn't exist, it still does for many people.

 

Maybe from his last post the OP has woken up, it seems so, but being a photographer is more than pointing a camera at something and expecting a picture to pop out at the other end of the process fully formed. Fingers crossed.

 

From where I sit, if you care about the end result, you shoot raw period. In most cases, you can always press a button to invoke someone else's algorithm to generate a jpg if you have a mind to.

 

That said, I somewhat disagree about increased memory/disk space not being an issue if you shoot large numbers of frames and have a mindset around keeping everything, good and bad. In general, I shoot somewhere between 1 to 5K fames a month. At 25Mb a whack, that winds up being a relatively large number. At this level of activity, you either need a fairly serious workstation and/or a multi-terabyte file server to back things up. Additionally, LR, in particular, is a memory pig.  I do the majority of my editing on a late 2013 Mac Pro with 8Gb ram and 256Gb SSD.  Beyond only being able to store a week or two's worth of current work locally given the size of my SSD, unless I close every other app on the box prior to starting work it has no where near enough ram to get the job done Even then, after a few minutes, things slow down. Quite intolerable to have lag when one is using tools, but its something I have to put up with all the time. It is not unusual to have to close and reopen LR several times during the course of an editing session. 

 

Now, of course, most of this is down to LR's habit of becoming worse and worse at memory management with every passing release. But once you commit to LR, you're pretty much stuck with it. I hope to address this, as it would seem Adobe never will, with the upcoming MB pro and at least 32GB, assuming Apple ever gets off its rear end and releases one. Which means we are talking top of the line and not cheap.  So while I agree that if you're serious enough about your images to own a Leica, you're doing yourself a tremendous disservice not shooting DNG, and indeed 25MB per capture on disk might not be excessive if you shoot a thousand frames a year, if, OTOH, you want to get your money's worth out of an M, in my experience storing and manipulating DNG files requires a fairly significant commitment in terms of computing hardware. 

[ianman]

One concern I have having done this LR appears  to loose the original in camera creation date in output JPGs which is a bit disappointing and from googling this appears to be a common query to which there doesn't appear to be a solution. 

 

I am now developing in my mind a way of structuring my collection of DNGs and JPGs - put the processed JPGs in a subfolder to the DNGs.

 

 

Hello John,

 

I have read through the thread and am glad you seem a lot happier with you new "toy" now. Apart from one or two pointless and frankly unhelpful comments, you have received some pretty good advice here.

 

One thing I would like to add that may be of interest to you is that I found myself in a situation similar to your regarding space and back ups. I was storing everything (but in my case .dng and .jpg) on hard drives... and unbelievably I had 2 of them fail on me in a big way in the space of a few days. I had never had any issue like it since I started using computers back in the early 80s. Anyway, as some have said here, it's really worth investing in a good storage and backup system. I lost many photos and it's a horrible feeling. 

 

My choice was to get a 16 TB NAS (4 x 4 TB) and set up RAID (5 or 6 I can't remember). But that is still not enough, from there, I backup my raw files and their settings to Amazon Glacier for long storage, just in case !!

 

By the way, it is possible to get some pretty good and very usable jpegs right out of the M... well out of the M9 anyway, I haven't really followed what's new with the subsequent Ms.

[ECohen]

".............requires a fairly significant commitment in terms of computing hardware"

 

I would agree ....remember how much we spent on a film ,a darkroom, paper, chemicals, etc.

Welcome to the 21st Century......a nice place to be.

 

I fought the re learning, more so than the re tooling.......now that I know how again.......I wonder what took me so long.

I Love the fact that I come from a sound place in the history of photography as I take the journey of digital photography.

 

I guess that's another reason why I enjoy using the M.

[jhluxton]

From where I sit, if you care about the end result, you shoot raw period. In most cases, you can always press a button to invoke someone else's algorithm to generate a jpg if you have a mind to.

 

That said, I somewhat disagree about increased memory/disk space not being an issue if you shoot large numbers of frames and have a mindset around keeping everything, good and bad. In general, I shoot somewhere between 1 to 5K fames a month. At 25Mb a whack, that winds up being a relatively large number. At this level of activity, you either need a fairly serious workstation and/or a multi-terabyte file server to back things up. Additionally, LR, in particular, is a memory pig.  I do the majority of my editing on a late 2013 Mac Pro with 8Gb ram and 256Gb SSD.  Beyond only being able to store a week or two's worth of current work locally given the size of my SSD, unless I close every other app on the box prior to starting work it has no where near enough ram to get the job done Even then, after a few minutes, things slow down. Quite intolerable to have lag when one is using tools, but its something I have to put up with all the time. It is not unusual to have to close and reopen LR several times during the course of an editing session. 

 

Now, of course, most of this is down to LR's habit of becoming worse and worse at memory management with every passing release. But once you commit to LR, you're pretty much stuck with it. I hope to address this, as it would seem Adobe never will, with the upcoming MB pro and at least 32GB, assuming Apple ever gets of its rear end and releases one. Which means we are talking top of the line and not cheap.  So while I agree that if you're serious enough about your images to own a Leica, you're doing yourself a tremendous disservice not shooting DNG, and indeed 25MB per capture on disk might not be excessive if you shoot a thousand frames a year, if, OTOH, you want to get your money's worth out of an M, in my experience storing and manipulating DNG files requires a fairly significant commitment in terms of computing hardware. 

 

I tend to retain about 7,000 to 8,000 images per year. I work with a PC and upgraded this earlier in the year to a Dell XPS with 16GB.

 

John 

[Manoleica]

I tend to retain about 7,000 to 8,000 images per year. I work with a PC and upgraded this earlier in the year to a Dell XPS with 16GB.

 

John 

I run a 1Tb External HD for each individual camera.. 

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Hallo,

Look here: Leica M

[ECohen]

I tend to retain about 7,000 to 8,000 images per year. I work with a PC and upgraded this earlier in the year to a Dell XPS with 16GB.

 

John 

 

Learn Lightroom. Get a couple big Hard Drives and your be fine for at least 5 years ( as long as you delete the dogs)....Who knows where digital will be by then?

Everyone's needs are different. Enjoy your camera and you'll figure out what you need /want...........My guess is that it will be another lens 

 

This Forum will always be here with advice.

[ianman]

Whatever *local* storage is used, I would strongly suggest some sort of cloud backup too. As I wrote in an earlier post, I had two 1TB LaCie drives which had major hardware issues (i.e. unrecoverable, everything is lost for good), a few months ago. Luckily, I had quite a lot of my photographs backed up on DVDs but not all.

Amazon Glacier sees ideal in this situation. As it is only meant to be storage for rarely accessed files, for instance after a major issue with local storage, the actual cost is peanuts. It's only if and when you download files that it can get a bit pricey.

 

... and I have nowhere near 7 or 8000 photographs per year ;-)