Unveiling M11?

[MikeMyers]

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57 minutes ago, adan said:

So that you get an image 4 times brighter when the camera is set to ISO 1600 than when it is set to ISO 200 (everything else being equal)

Thank you for the explanation - very helpful.

I'm confused by what you wrote - going from ISO 200 to 1600 should be 3 "stops,  8 times brighter, not four - or what am I missing here??

Thanks for the images - after a year of studying them, maybe I'll understand them better.

[Adam Bonn]

51 minutes ago, adan said:

The metadata also contains other "suggestions" for post-processing software to use, such as a tone/contrast curve, or the white-balance that the camera would have used, had the picture been a .jpeg instead of a .DNG/raw.

The ‘AsShotNeutral’ tag in the DNG is important to Adobe, it uses it in conjunction with the DCP colour matrices to calculate the CCT based on a xyY value derived from the sum (which I’ve hideously over simplified for brevity) ASN x CM = xyY

When we shoot a colorchecker to produce a profile, we create new colour matrices, but we can’t change what the camera creates as the ASN (only control it via a whibal etc)

All this can of course be negated by manually moving the WB and tint sliders in LR 🙂 

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[RS-Colo]

3 hours ago, MikeMyers said:

It's crumby?

???

[MikeMyers]

16 hours ago, SrMi said:

The core modifications cannot be turned off, and differ by manufacturer.

My advice from the DxO PhotoLab forum is to set the white balance to 5600K, and turn off ALL the automated stuff on my cameras, shoot only in RAW, and allow PhotoLab to select the camera and lens corrections from their database based on which camera body and lens I am using.  There are so, so, so many things on a Nikon that I need to de-activate.  There are many less on my M10, but I turn off anything the camera is doing to "help".  

I guess if I was using JPG images, I'd let the camera do everything, and forget Using PhotoLab, which was designed for raw images.

2 hours ago, Adam Bonn said:

The ‘AsShotNeutral’ tag in the DNG is important to Adobe, it uses it in conjunction with the DCP colour matrices to calculate the CCT based on a xyY value derived from the sum (which I’ve hideously over simplified for brevity) ASN x CM = xyY

When we shoot a colorchecker to produce a profile, we create new colour matrices, but we can’t change what the camera creates as the ASN (only control it via a whibal etc)

Adam, I'm not going to ask you to explain all that in simple English, but it's way over my head.  Tags DCP color matrices, CCT based on a xyY value derived from the sum...  ASN x CM = xyY, color checker, color matrices, ASN......   I appreciate how much you understand, way, way, WAY over my head, but to me that's like when people were discussing which developer to use for film.   Me?  I just want a good raw image and software that will help me turn it into a finished result that I can print or share.

That's what I hate the most about my Nikon cameras - the menus to me are absurd.  The menus in my M8 and M10 are mostly understandable, and I don't need a Phd and a doctorate degree to understand them.  

I've got my old M8.2 camera, which creates DNG images.  I can put an infrared filter on it, use the exposure meter built into the camera, capture an image, edit it as a B&W image in DarkTable, and in fifteen minutes get a result like what I'll post below.  To me, *that* is photography.  Follow the basic rules, focus, set the exposure, and edit.  

(.....and I'm sure there are lots of people like you, who know and understand all these technical things, and I suspect you enjoy working with them, but none of that is why I enjoy Leica cameras, which for the most part are mostly quite simple.  Set focus, exposure, compose, and shoot.  I would hope that the M11 is just as easy to use as my M10, which is even easier to use than my M8.)

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[fotografr]

With all the technical data discussed here in detail and which leaves me completely dumbfounded, I'm surprised I've ever been able to make an image with a digital camera. I've just been metering the scenes, composing and clicking the shutter and somehow I end up with a photograph.

[Jeff S]

19 minutes ago, MikeMyers said:

butMe?  I just want a good raw image and software that will help me turn it into a finished result that I can print or share.

 

 

And yet all of these good comments are in specific response to your continuing request to have all the technical underpinnings explained to you.    Better to just learn how your own gear responds to different conditions and to your processing workflow and desired rendering/ouput, for which there are infinite possibilities using any given gear.  IQ is rarely the limiting factor these days for most all quality systems in the hands of a competent photographer (and editor/printer).  The files are generally flexible enough, and the PP tools sufficient, to apply one’s own interpretation, regardless of small manufacturer tweaks.
 

Jeff

[SrMi]

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8 minutes ago, fotografr said:

With all the technical data discussed here in detail and which leaves me completely dumbfounded, I'm surprised I've ever been able to make an image with a digital camera. I've just been metering the scenes, composing and clicking the shutter and somehow I end up with a photograph.

I am always dumbfounded when people feel intimidated or threatened by the knowledge shared.
Maybe, every time a technical question is asked, the answer should be: fuggedaboutit, it will not help your photography :).

[ianman]

On 12/20/2021 at 9:21 PM, SrMi said:

And M8 horribly expensive, since 8 is a very lucky number in China.

I'd just tell the seller that it's doubly unlucky

 

[Adam Bonn]

52 minutes ago, MikeMyers said:

Adam, I'm not going to ask you to explain all that in simple English, but it's way over my head.  Tags DCP color matrices, CCT based on a xyY value derived from the sum...  ASN x CM = xyY, color checker, color matrices, ASN......   I appreciate how much you understand, way, way, WAY over my head, but to me that's like when people were discussing which developer to use for film.   Me?  I just want a good raw image and software that will help me turn it into a finished result that I can print or share.

That's what I hate the most about my Nikon cameras - the menus to me are absurd.  The menus in my M8 and M10 are mostly understandable, and I don't need a Phd and a doctorate degree to understand them.  

I've got my old M8.2 camera, which creates DNG images.  I can put an infrared filter on it, use the exposure meter built into the camera, capture an image, edit it as a B&W image in DarkTable, and in fifteen minutes get a result like what I'll post below.  To me, *that* is photography.  Follow the basic rules, focus, set the exposure, and edit.  

(.....and I'm sure there are lots of people like you, who know and understand all these technical things, and I suspect you enjoy working with them, but none of that is why I enjoy Leica cameras, which for the most part are mostly quite simple.  Set focus, exposure, compose, and shoot.  I would hope that the M11 is just as easy to use as my M10, which is even easier to use than my M8.)

I blame Covid!!

During the last lockdown I thought, damn I'm going to learn what exactly LR does to work with profiles, I mean I shoot a colorchecker and make a profile, but I'm never that happy with it, and colour checker profiles are always so much smaller than adobe ones - I wonder what all the extra bits do in adobe profiles?

I failed maths twice, once at school and once in night school, but who cares right? I mean who ever needs algebra right?

Turns out the key to all of this is maths!! Yay marvellous 

http://www.brucelindbloom.com/Eqn_ChromAdapt.html

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This is how to make a forward matrix.

I would embarrass myself to tell you how long it took me to figure this out even with a bit of help (plus i had to teach myself some basic python skills in order to use Octave in order to crunch the data)

So why did I bother?

Well as discussed above... what we think of as 'RAW' is something akin to a microwave meal... not SOOC jpeg microwave meal granted... but not really RAW either... more like that supermarket sushi that's actually cooked fish

Nothing anyone can do about that really...

So if you can't re-engineer the ingredients, then you can at least learn how to get more out of the microwave !!

One lockdown lasting rabbit hole of profile creation theory later and I've learnt enough to know that I don't that much at all, but I know so much more than I did before!

=============

Some folks shoot film

Some folks develop in a lab

Some folks develop at home

Some folks develop at home and tweak the process

Some folks develop at home and find new chemicals that make new things

Digital isn't so different.

=========

You mention printing Mike

I'm no printer (yes I know, burn me as a witch)

I pay people to print when I need a decent print

But other folks (perhaps you Mike?) know loads about printing at home, for them it's part of the process and they're great at it.

It's all a layer cake, and if a picture we consider good comes out at the end. who cares about the journey

[MikeMyers]

2 hours ago, Adam Bonn said:

Well as discussed above... what we think of as 'RAW' is something akin to a microwave meal... not SOOC jpeg microwave meal granted... but not really RAW either... more like that supermarket sushi that's actually cooked fish

I was actually quite good at math, until they started on calculus and analytic geometry, but that's 50 years ago.  Maybe I'm just "old and slow".  As a relative put it "mild cognitive impairment", but I'm not at that point yet.

To me, "jpg" images from a camera imply a quick capture of what the camera saw.  To me "raw" means all the data collected by the sensor", which I have just learned isn't really the case, so now I think of it as far more information than a small jpg can hold.  I can make good images from my image editor from jpg files, and I can usually make them even better from raw files, so all my cameras are now configured to only shoot in raw.  Why buy a Leica if I'm just going to take snapshots?

Using your analogy, I think of "jpg" as a meal from a fast food restaurant.  I think of "raw" as all the ingredients that will be used to cook a meal, ready for me to use as I cook the meal.  

 

Back to M11, most of what I have read sounds excellent.  I'm all for 50 or 60 megapixel sensor ONLY if I can still capture images the size of my M10.  I really do NOT want all my images to be 100 megs.  I'd like to be able to do that for special occasions.  I'm not all that picky, and I haven't seen any reason yet to change to an M11.  A higher resolution Visoflex sounds like a wonderful idea - the day it becomes available from B&H, I'll have one on order.

Can I give you a challenge?  Take a new photo from your camera, and process it however you want, just using basic tools from your software.  Also take a second photo, and process it using all the special things you just noted, spend as much time as you wish, and then post that image at the same size as the first, posting both of them here any way you wish to.  If possible, post the original images, so any of us can download them and work with them.  I'd like to see with my own eyes what all that mathematical work might do to improve an image beyond just using the regular tools (exposure, contrast, saturation, crop, straightening, and if you want, dodging/burning in).  All the tools that regular editors can do.

In my mind, all that math allows you to understand things better, but I'm curious if it will result in a better image.  Anyway, I should shut up now, and let the discussion continue as it has been.  I suspect there are lots of people here who ARE interested in these things you've been describing.  That they are over my head is my fault, not yours......

[adan]

6 hours ago, MikeMyers said:

I'm confused by what you wrote - going from ISO 200 to 1600 should be 3 "stops,  8 times brighter, not four - or what am I missing here??

You are correct - I got bolluxed up counting stops 200 - 400 - 800 - 1600.

[jslabovitz]

30 minutes ago, MikeMyers said:

I'd like to see with my own eyes what all that mathematical work might do to improve an image beyond just using the regular tools (exposure, contrast, saturation, crop, straightening, and if you want, dodging/burning in).  

The 'regular tools' are just simplified expressions of certain algorithms. Most anything you can do using exposure or contrast, you could equally do with curves. And curves are themselves a simplified expressions of numeric adjustments, which mostly come down to basic arithmetic. Some tools, like noise reduction, operate with a larger context -- say, of a set of neighboring pixels, for example -- but really, it's all mathematical.

I mostly use the basic tools you mention, as well as curves; rarely do I use more complex tools, as they don't seem to be necessary to my particular vision.

I'm a (retired) programmer, as well as a photographer. Although I'm (hopefully) working in an aesthetic realm when I work on my images, I do consider what is likely happening to the values of the pixels in my image: are neighboring pixels becoming more different to each other (contrast); are they all being amplified to the same degree (exposure); are they being averaged (basic noise reduction); are they reaching some important constraint value (clipping)? I don't obsess about it, but it does seem to help me as I edit.

I guess what I'm saying is that there's not necessarily more or less mathematical methods, but there's a certain *consciousness* of the underlying mathematics of image processing that sometimes helps.

On the other hand, I will admit to often pressing the 'Auto tone' button in Lr and being totally happy with the results. :-)

[MikeMyers]

20 minutes ago, jslabovitz said:

I'm a (retired) programmer, as well as a photographer. Although I'm (hopefully) working in an aesthetic realm when I work on my images, I do consider what is likely happening to the values of the pixels in my image: are neighboring pixels becoming more different to each other (contrast); are they all being amplified to the same degree (exposure); are they being averaged (basic noise reduction); are they reaching some important constraint value (clipping)? I don't obsess about it, but it does seem to help me as I edit.

 

Gee, that's a fascinating way to think of it.  That's what is happening to the pixels, to cause us to think that the image is "sharper", "brighter", "darker", whatever.  I can understand and appreciate that the "visual change" I might see in an image, was caused by manipulating the pixels, as you note.  I need to think about this some more - thank you!  Does anyone make a utility that allows us to  clearly view pixels?  

I used to use a magnifier under my enlarger, and to actually focus on the pixels, not "the image".  Since the pixels ARE the image, that worked very well.   Not sure if this would work with digital.....

 

Added later - maybe I'll try to understand this:

https://processing.org/tutorials/pixels

Edited December 22, 2021 by MikeMyers

[fotografr]

6 hours ago, SrMi said:

I am always dumbfounded when people feel intimidated or threatened by the knowledge shared.
Maybe, every time a technical question is asked, the answer should be: fuggedaboutit, it will not help your photography :).

I'm not sure why my comment led you think I feel intimidated and threatened. If it makes you feel superior to have that attitude, it's rather pathetic.

Edited December 22, 2021 by fotografr

[SrMi]

11 minutes ago, fotografr said:

I'm not sure why my comment lead you think I feel intimidated and threatened. If it makes you feel superior to have that attitude, it's rather pathetic.

It seems that your post was more in a joking than a serious tone. It is hard to tell on forums. 
On some forums that I participate in, I have seen a strange reaction once knowledge, sometimes also over my head, is being shared. Some posters get very defensive and feel that their way of practicing photography is being criticized. It feels like knowledge would hurt their photography.
I apologize for misunderstanding your post.

 

Edited December 22, 2021 by SrMi

[fotografr]

1 minute ago, SrMi said:

It seems that your post was more in a joking than a serious tone. It is hard to tell on forums. 
On some forums that I participate in, I have seen a strange reaction once knowledge, sometimes also over my head, is being shared. Some posters get very defensive and feel that their way of practicing photography is being criticized. It feels like knowledge would hurt their photograophy.
I apologize for misunderstanding your post.

 

You're correct, I was joking and I apologize for my response as well. There was, however, a kernel of truth in my remark. These discussions can become more complex and detailed than they need to be. I don't feel one needs to know the tensile strength of the steel in their automobile's axel in order to know how to turn the corner.

[jslabovitz]

2 hours ago, MikeMyers said:

Does anyone make a utility that allows us to  clearly view pixels?  

 

Photoshop will work -- I just tried it, and I can zoom up to 12,800%, giving me nice chunky pixels! (Lightroom seems to smooth the pixels at high-zoom, which isn't helpful in this case.)
 

If you also ensure the 'Info' view (window? tile?) is open, you should be able to hover over each pixel-square to determine its numeric value. Watch those numbers while you adjust exposure, etc.

[sarkleshark]

So, back to topic,  do you think there will be an official announcement before the USA unveiling events?  I doubt Leica would leave each location to unveil on their own independently and it would be quite the undertaking to coordinate together.

 

 

[AlanD]

5 hours ago, MikeMyers said:

Using your analogy, I think of "jpg" as a meal from a fast food restaurant.  I think of "raw" as all the ingredients that will be used to cook a meal, ready for me to use as I cook the meal.  

...

Back to M11, most of what I have read sounds excellent.  I'm all for 50 or 60 megapixel sensor ONLY if I can still capture images the size of my M10.  I really do NOT want all my images to be 100 megs.  I'd like to be able to do that for special occasions.  I'm not all that picky, and I haven't seen any reason yet to change to an M11.  A higher resolution Visoflex sounds like a wonderful idea - the day it becomes available from B&H, I'll have one on order.

The tricky part is that although in-camera JPEGs are usually fast-food meals, there is no reason they cannot be "single Michelin star" performance.  How often with the RAW image are you pulling back the highlights a bit and boosting the shadows up?  Fuji and Pentax allow you to tune the JPEG curve directly like that to separately control contrast for the.  RAW is exactly as you describe.  That's where you can really fine tune the performance to get the exact result you want whether it's 3-star Michelin or home/comfort cooking.

One of the beauties of going to a restaurant is that you don't have to deal with the dishes and clean-up.  That's one of the reasons people still like the M9 even though objectively it's not as good as the latest sensor technology.  It's just that the default color response and tone curves happen to be beautiful...

---

On the topic of resolution, I agree 90% with you.  I replaced my Leica S 006 with a GFX100 and the size of those files gets unwieldly quickly.  However, one of the real strengths of having a lot of megapixels is that when you down-res to 1/4th the native resolution, you essentially no longer are using the Bayer filter to interpolate color and have RGB data for every pixel in the final result.

You can see that with this example where everything is DOWNSAMPLED to 8 megapixels.
Studio shot comparison: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Here, you can see the at the 5D (12MP), M10 (24MP), Q2 (47MP), GFX100 (102MP) perform very differently.  You have less color artifacts in fine detail with the higher resolution sensors.

It would be great if the M11 had a mode where it could capture a downsampled image where you had almost 100% color info.  Since it's RGBG, I assume there's some sort of trickery that could get it to be ~18MP (i.e. just like the M9) with incredible tonality and color.

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[Adam Bonn]

9 hours ago, MikeMyers said:

Can I give you a challenge?  Take a new photo from your camera, and process it however you want, just using basic tools from your software.  Also take a second photo, and process it using all the special things you just noted, spend as much time as you wish, and then post that image at the same size as the first, posting both of them here any way you wish to.  If possible, post the original images, so any of us can download them and work with them.  I'd like to see with my own eyes what all that mathematical work might do to improve an image beyond just using the regular tools (exposure, contrast, saturation, crop, straightening, and if you want, dodging/burning in).  All the tools that regular editors can do.

Hi Mike,

No I'm not going to do this because I'm not sure it adds anything.

Profiling a camera is a bit like using a preset, it automates things you do frequently.

And like presets you can either buy other people's or make your own

Profiling a camera using code is a way to control the content of the profile, to get away from the next, next, finish nature of pre-packaged profiling tools, ie making your own.

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Here we have the exact same image.

It has zero edits and is with as shot white balance.

The image on the left has the Leica 'embedded' profile for the M10.

The image on the right has the exact same profile, the exact same as shot WB, but I've used the maths above (which incidentally is the Bradford D50 Chromatic Adaptation, as recommended in the DNG spec) to create a forward matrix that maps the StdA colormatrix to the D50 white point.

Now the big question....

Could I have done this with the tools in LR or some other way to achieve the same thing?

Maybe I could of set a custom WB before taking the shot?

Maybe I could have just eyeballed it with the WB slider in LR or eye dropper clicked somewhere in the image?

And the answer is...

Yes of course.

But for me why do this every time when I can automate it by tweaking Leica's profile to actually meet the spec to which is should adhere?

Let's put this another way.

Upon release a moderately frequent comment about the M10 was I really like the embedded profile in daylight, but under artificial light it has way to much orange in it

Do you think that's a fair comment?

I think yes - look at the picture on the left!

But the truth is Leica's profile contains absolutely no information about orange at all, it 'merely' lacks the information for LR to calculate the colour

and the trouble with LR is that if doesn't have the info it needs, it tends to guess!

So I like too

1) give it the info it needs to do what it wants, so I can do what I want

2) put my most frequent requests to LR in a profile format so that I only have to ask once (and sometimes I make my own presets to work with my profiles)

And the D50 CAT is a good example of that, WB remains a fluid calculation within the app (eg I've not told it to always use the same value for WB regardless), but now WB (whether AWB, greycard or eyeballed after the shot) works more robustly as LR has the correct tools.

The above is the easiest example I can show...

But the same logic holds true for everything.

The profiling tool has a better HSL tool than the LR one (which wouldn't be hard to be fair!!) also the tone curve tool etc etc

So for me it's not about oh look how clever I am I can profile my camera even though I could probably make those adjustments in LR/C1/etc anyway

Nope.

It's about tailoring the app to do as much as it can in the way I want it too using more precise tools, thus cutting down on my time editing pictures in future. Because (believe it or not) I would actually rather be shooting than editing

==============

and yes folks, the cat picture would still need editing work to be any where near finished, I just present it as is to show the effects of the forward matrix as requested by Mike.

(incidentally I took that picture the day I got my M10 to test exactly what I've written above)