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FIlippo Drudi's avatar

Looking forward to the new Kodachrome profiles. I love the current ones; I use them all the time!

If I may ask, did you manage to improve the consistency across cameras (and camera brands)?

Like Fujifilm cameras, for instance, that don't have a neutral camera profile, or any of their simulation profiles available.

I noticed you built those starting with the Adobe Standard profile, which gives quite a different result (although still pleasing), even more so with the updated 2014 standard profiles, which are far less saturated.

I shoot with both Nikon and Fujifilm—and sometimes even Panasonic. It's not uncommon for me to use them all on a shoot, but I still want my images to look consistent right away when I import them and apply the preset.

When I discovered the issue, I spent a few months experimenting, trying to find a solution and eventually found a way to "tweak" the camera profiles, so that now if I shoot the same scene with any of my cameras, the photos will be pretty much identical, save for minor WB compensation.

I wondered if you improved them on that front as well.

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Gavin Gough's avatar

Hi FIlippo

Thanks for your message. Consistency across camera models is something that I've been very conscious of. I've tested the new Kodachrome emulation with all the major camera brands and consistency is good. I have more testing to do but the way the new version is built irons out some of the differences between makes and models.

I hope you'll find the new version to be an improvement and look forward to hearing what you think.

Thanks for your interest.

Gavin

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FIlippo Drudi's avatar

Thanks for your reply. I'm very curious to see what you've been cooking.

So far, even with those little kinks, your presets are the best money spent on any photography-related gear. By far.

Thank you for your work.

Filippo

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Gavin Gough's avatar

Thank you, FIlippo. I may quote you on that! 😁

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Gavin Gough's avatar

Hi Monica

In principle, you can use whatever manual or automatic controls you're familiar with. When you introduce exposure compensation, the camera will adjust whatever automatic controls are available to it.

In practice, I find it's better to reduce the number of variables, ensuring that the camera is only adjusting the shutter speed.

I prefer to keep the ISO as low as possible to reduce noise, so I set that manually. I definitely want to select the aperture myself, in order to control the depth-of-field.

With those two variables determined by me, I know the camera can only adjust the shutter speed. I can be sure that the camera is not adjusting the ISO or aperture in order to achieve an exposure.

But as I say, it doesn't really matter in terms of the exposure compensation. The main thing to remember is that the camera pretty much assumes every scene has an average, neutral brightness and of course that's rarely ever true.

Maybe do some tests if you have time? Try dialling-in exposure compensation with whatever auto settings you typically use, even on full-auto, and you'll see which settings the camera is changing as the exposure compensation is reduced or increased. Then try setting a specific ISO and a specific aperture and watch the camera adjust the shutter speed. Or manually set the shutter speed and aperture and see how the camera has to alter the ISO as you move the exposure compensation dial up and down.

It's a lot easier to demonstrate that to explain in words!

If you do any experiments and have questions, I'm very happy to take a crack at a simpler explanation. It's definitely more straightforward than I've made it sound here. Good luck.

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Aileen's avatar

Hi Gavin! Do you ever get concerned that in those lower light conditions (and then dropping your exp comp) that your shutter speed will drop too low? Do you have a SS setting that you know you can't shoot below or you risk camera shake, risk losing sharpness, etc?

I enjoyed reading about how you approach those situations. I usually bump up my ISO so that I can maintain my lower aperture (2, 2.8, etc), and I know my photographs are better if I don't drop below 1/60th for SS. I really thought it was interesting that you go for the lowest ISO whereas that's where I'm bumping it up. I'm going to play around with your approach and see how that works for me. I generally don't touch my exp comp and leave it only slightly lower (.25, .5).

Thanks for sharing your photographs and your process! So very interesting.

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Gavin Gough's avatar

Hi Aileen

The old rule-of-thumb used to be that shutter speeds ought to be greater than the focal length of the lens to avoid/reduce camera shake. So when using a 50mm lens, shutter speeds should always be faster than 1/50th of a second. A telephoto 200mm lens needs shutter speeds faster than 1/200th but a wide-angle 30mm lens would be stable at anything faster than 1/30th.

The longer the focal length, the more camera movement is exaggerated.

These days, with image stabilisation in cameras and lenses, that rule might be relaxed a little but it's still a reasonable guide for shutter speeds.

A lot depends on how we're holding the camera, how much wine we had the night before, and how much coffee we've had trying to wake up that morning. Lots of variables. But 1/60th sounds reasonable if you're using a standard 50mm lens or maybe an 85mm lens if you've avoided the wine/coffee.

With my exposure compensation suggestion, if you dial-in minus -1⅓ stops, you're allowing less light into the camera so shutter speeds will be faster than normal.

If you're using wide apertures, ƒ/2 or ƒ/2.8, those also allow more light into the camera than smaller apertures (ƒ/8, ƒ/11 etc.), allowing you to use faster shutter speeds and/or lower ISO values. Every time you reduce the size of the aperture by one stop, ƒ/2 to ƒ/2.8, ƒ/2.8 to ƒ/4, ƒ/4 to ƒ/5.6 etc., you'll need to increase the ISO by one stop to compensate: ISO 100 to 200 to 400 to 800 (everything else being equal).

What does all that mean in practice?

For exposure compensation to work, at least one exposure setting must be set to Auto. It doesn't matter whether you allow the camera to automatically control the Aperture, Shutter Speed or ISO – or any two of those – or even all three – but it must be at least one.

If you know that you want 1/60th to avoid blur from camera shake and you also want to use ƒ/2 (shallow depth-of-field) then you should set those manually and turn Auto ISO on.

As you adjust the exposure compensation, the camera will change the ISO to compensate.

Or, as I typically do, you could set the Aperture AND the ISO manually, forcing the camera to adjust the Shutter Speed.

You're quite right, with this set-up, it's possible that the Shutter Speed could become longer/slower than our rule-of-thumb guide recommends so we'd have to be aware of that and increase the ISO if necessary.

It's entirely possible that my overly-long, top-of-the-head explanation has done nothing but muddy the waters. If so, apologies.

It's more confusing when trying to remember that lower aperture numbers = more light but higher fractions of a second = less light.

This web site has a better explanation of the exposure triangle.

https://photographylife.com/what-is-exposure-triangle

As with all things, practice makes perfect. I recommend finding a set up that works for you and the sort of photography you're doing. There's a lot to be said for going back to basics, turning off all the automatic controls for a while and setting everything manually in order to understand how changing one setting affects the others.

It's much easier demonstrating these things than writing them out. It might be time to do an online workshop!

Good luck. Let me know how you get on. Always happy to answer questions. 😁

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Aileen's avatar

Thank you Gavin! I so appreciate all the time you've spent here with your comment and your teaching. I will def play around with it and see what the results are!

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Monica's avatar

I don’t understand why, if you have dialed in adequate exposure compensation, you need to fix the ISO at one number. And why would you rather have the camera pick shutter speed instead of ISO when you have negative exposure compensation? Help me learn please!

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