Stupidity : Lesson 1

[StuartR]

Went to a "horsey" do yesterday. The son's girlfriend (and her horse obviously!) were in an event for ex race-horses that have retired and moved on to other things. It wasn't particularly interesting from my POV because there wasn't much action, it seemed to be about appraising the quality of the horses rather than making them do anything specific.

Anyway, it was a feeder event for "Horse of the Year" or something, so deemed to be important enough to record, hence my attendance. The venue (quite large) was indoors and it was a bit dull (no lights just natural daylight through the ceiling panels) so I had to move up to ISO 800 to stand any chance with my 70-300mm zoom which has a max aperture of f4/5.6.

When I got home I ran 98 out of 125 Canon RAW images (the rest scrapped for various reasons) through DxO using a standard setting - this took about an hour and a half courtesy of only having 1GB of RAM in my PC

I then loaded the files (now tiffs) into Adobe Bridge / CS2 for review and any further post-processing required, only to find they all lacked contrast and looked generally washed-out. Groan

So, I went through the lot, cropping where necessary and improving the contrast. I guess I could / should have set up an action for the contrast adjustment but that wouldn't have handled the cropping - yes, I know I should try to get it right in camera but it was a crowded arena and, besides the cropping, there was cloning of the odd horse's tail or hoof (and piles of steaming stuff!) that encroached on the shot. All the time I'm doing this I'm thinking "what settings did I have wrong that caused this, the lens is normally a good performer, the EXIF looks OK, even the histogram look fine").

So, after about 3 hours I'd finished and was reasonably pleased with the results. They weren't the best work I'd ever done by far but I'm sure she'll be happy I thought - at least she has a record of the day.

It was now midnight so I started to close my PC down and then I noticed that my desktop picture looked a bit washed out so I thought I'd calibrate my monitor (I'd been ignoring the warnings for a few days).

Guess what I'm doing this evening!..
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re-processing 98 images

Bugger.

In my defence, I was tired!

[Autumn]

Re: Stupidity : Lesson 1

Oh Stuart, what a day for you. I hope after all that you got some Keepers. Furthermore, we can all learn from your mistake - recalibrate the screen before adjustment.

I think it's about time I did mine!

[fluffy penguin]

Re: Stupidity : Lesson 1

oh bless what a waste

but confession time no idea how to do mine

hope you get them all sorted. to satisfaction

[coupekid]

Re: Stupidity : Lesson 1

Went to a "horsey" do yesterday. The son's girlfriend (and her horse obviously!) were in an event for ex race-horses that have retired and moved on to other things. It wasn't particularly interesting from my POV because there wasn't much action, it seemed to be about appraising the quality of the horses rather than making them do anything specific.

Anyway, it was a feeder event for "Horse of the Year" or something, so deemed to be important enough to record, hence my attendance. The venue (quite large) was indoors and it was a bit dull (no lights just natural daylight through the ceiling panels) so I had to move up to ISO 800 to stand any chance with my 70-300mm zoom which has a max aperture of f4/5.6.

When I got home I ran 98 out of 125 Canon RAW images (the rest scrapped for various reasons) through DxO using a standard setting - this took about an hour and a half courtesy of only having 1GB of RAM in my PC

I then loaded the files (now tiffs) into Adobe Bridge / CS2 for review and any further post-processing required, only to find they all lacked contrast and looked generally washed-out. Groan

So, I went through the lot, cropping where necessary and improving the contrast. I guess I could / should have set up an action for the contrast adjustment but that wouldn't have handled the cropping - yes, I know I should try to get it right in camera but it was a crowded arena and, besides the cropping, there was cloning of the odd horse's tail or hoof (and piles of steaming stuff!) that encroached on the shot. All the time I'm doing this I'm thinking "what settings did I have wrong that caused this, the lens is normally a good performer, the EXIF looks OK, even the histogram look fine").

So, after about 3 hours I'd finished and was reasonably pleased with the results. They weren't the best work I'd ever done by far but I'm sure she'll be happy I thought - at least she has a record of the day.

It was now midnight so I started to close my PC down and then I noticed that my desktop picture looked a bit washed out so I thought I'd calibrate my monitor (I'd been ignoring the warnings for a few days).

Guess what I'm doing this evening!..
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
re-processing 98 images

Bugger.

In my defence, I was tired!

Blimey, thats a serious Doh! moment......
.....maybe batch process them back?

[StuartR]

Re: Stupidity : Lesson 1

Blimey, thats a serious Doh! moment......
.....maybe batch process them back?

You can say that again!

All done now, went through them all fairly quickly but still a couple of hours of a lovely evening lost....I won't do it again in a hurry, that's for sure!

As I said, not my best work but I was quite pleased with how well the image stabilisation worked. No EXIF to check as I lifted this jpg off my website while at work, but IIRC from when I checked it last night it was 1/15th sec @f/5 at circa 360mm (in 35mm equivalent terms). Hand-held and standing up but braced against a wall. They were about 70' away so flash wouldn't have helped much - not sure it would be allowed anyway.



Interestingly (well to me anyway). This image looks quite different on my work monitor (quite a good one but uncalibrated) than it did on my calibrated monitor at home. A bit too much detail lost to black in the horse's front legs perhaps..