Today I'm using the Nikon D810 with the Sigma 24-105,
about four thousand dollars worth of gear. -I have the Pentax K200 which you can
pick up on eBay for about a hundred bucks, with the lens. -And we're going
head-to-head because Tony is saying that with a little bit of time, patience and
skill, he can get a more technically perfect picture or equally perfect
picture as I can with the D810. -If you have money but no time,
that's a good setup, but I bet if you have time and no money you can get
better results with this.
-AAAHHH hahaha, that's way suckier than I though. -We did not expect the snow
to be this deep
-So i'm going to be using a base ISO of 64 and using this lenses sweet spot for
the aperture which is f/8.
I'm done.
I'm at f/8 too, my base ISO is ISO 100, so let's see how a quick snapshot compares.
Even at a glance the D810's picture's far sharper. Zoom in tight and you really
see what you get for that extra thirty- nine hundred dollars. Pull in even
tighter on the sky and we see that the Pentax shows chunky noise in the blue
sky and shadows. While the Nikon is much smoother. Crank up the brightness to
really see the shadow noise and again, the Nikon obviously wins.
I just ran out of batteries.
So the shadow noise didn't quite keep up, but that's a pretty easy fix. I'm just gonna throw
this on a tripod and take a bunch of pictures and then use a technique called
image averaging, which will pull all those images together and just basically
gather far more light than I could in a single exposure.
This is one of those times when live view would help on this thing..
-yeah i know -If you have Lightroom and Photoshop, select all your pictures,
right click them and then select open as layers in Photoshop. I took 27 pictures,
but four to eight pictures is usually enough. Once Photoshop loads the images,
open the select menu and then select all layers. Now open the Edit menu and select
Auto align layers.
The default is fine, click ok. This might take a minute to process.
NNow open the layer menu, select smart object and select convert to smart
object.
When it's done open the layer menu select smart objects, stack mode.
Now I'll save and close the picture to bring it back into Lightroom. Here you
can see the averaged image has smooth clouds.
That's because they were moving, and blending the image essentially creates a
30-second exposure.
Yep, you can use image averaging to get the effect of a neutral density filter
when you don't have one in your bag.
Zooming in tight on the sky, we see that the averaged image has no visible noise in the sky.
Cranking up the contrast makes the difference even more obvious.
Looking at the shadow noise
the averaged image on the right is far cleaner than the single image on the
left.
Comparing the averaged image to the Nikon's?
The averaged image from the Pentax is cleaner but definitely not sharper. Now I
know, Photoshop costs money and this all about being cheap.
Well guess what? You can get all this done with the free Gimp tool. Also, Lightroom and
Photoshop don't have to cost that much. In the US you can get them for $9.99
a month bundled together. In GIMP, which you can download for free at GIMP.org,
open the file menu and select open as layers.
Select all the pictures you want to stack by clicking the first picture and
then shift clicking the last picture. Now manually adjust the opacity of the
layers. The bottom layer should have an opacity of one hundred percent. The second
layer from the bottom should have an opacity of fifty percent, or 100 divided by two.
To determine the opacity of each layer divide 100 by the layer number. So the
third layer from the bottom has an opacity of thirty-three percent because
100 divided by 3 equals thirty-three. The fourth layer is 100 divided by 4, or 25.
Repeat for each layer. Now export your picture.
In the file menu select export as and then save your averaged image as a jpeg.
-Relaxing on the beach
-Haha, show off. So that helped a lot with the shadow noise, but it doesn't overcome
that D810's
36 megapixel sensor, that super sharp lens. So to do that I'm going to make a
panorama. But I'm going to combine both these techniques.
I'm gonna use a panorama, stitching together multiple telephoto pictures of
this place, and use image averaging for each of those pictures so each one will
be low noise and then i'll combine all those pictures to get a high megapixel
photo.
Just a little patience. For the panorama, I'm zooming up on a small section of the
building and then I'll take a picture, or a bunch of pictures, so I can stack them.
And then move a little bit to the right, take another picture and a bunch of
pictures,
move to the right. So in total I'm going to do a bunch of pictures horizontally
and then three rows vertically and stitch them all together in the computer.
You don't want to change your exposure settings or refocus, this is one of those
times when back button focus works really well, just back button focus with the
first picture, lock my settings in with manual and then keep those
throughout the shot. If you do screw it up, though, the software pretty much straightens
it for you.
You want to overlap each one of your pictures by about one-third or more, left
to right as well as up and down. If you want a more detailed picture,
zoom in tighter so that you have to take more pictures.
I usually prefer a ball head, but a panto head like this actually makes panoramas
easier, right? Allowing you to just move horizontally and vertically
perfectly.
Don't feel like you have to line everything up perfectly,
the software will straighten your pictures and fix any lens distortion.
You can do this hand-held too, just be sure to hold perfectly still when taking
pictures.
You get the idea. Zoom in and snap lots of overlapping pictures until you've
photographed every part of the scene leaving plenty of room to crop on every
side.
I took 18 stacks of six pictures for a total of a hundred and eight photos, with
unsharp images removed.
I need to do the image averaging for each of the 18 stacks using the process
I showed earlier. To speed it up a bit,
I created a Photoshop action that you can download at SDP.io/actions.
I threw in a bonus action for median stacking, which removes moving people
from a stack of photos.
I repeated that process for each of the 18 stacks and then exported the averaged
pictures as high quality jpegs. Now I'll use Microsoft Ice to combine the
pictures into a panorama.
It's a free download from SDP.io/ice.
It's Windows only, but you can find other panorama software for mac OS, Linux, iOS
and Android. Just drag all the pictures into Ice,
it puts them together for you. Click Next and zoom in to see your picture better.
Now click the projection that looks best with your picture.
Make sure the lines are straight and nothing looks too distorted. Dragging the
picture up or down on the grid can change the projection and distortion too.
Once you find a natural-looking projection, click Next to move to step
three, crop.
Now you'll see why I recommended you take extra pictures and shoot wider than
necessary.
You'll end up clipping a good part of your picture out.
When you're done cropping, click Next to move to the final step.
Export your picture as a Tiff for best quality or as a jpeg if you want to
share it right away.
Let's find out whether that work paid off. I gave Chelsea a blind test during
our weekly live broadcast.
This is going to be a blind test - I just tell me which of these pictures you
think is technically better, which is sharper. -They actually both look
almost the same. Maybe the one on the right is a hair sharper?
Yeah the one on the right is sharper. But, is that the Pentax? -that is the Pentax!
That's the Pentax, I won, in your face! -yes, but -you said it couldn't be done. You with
your fancy camera. -No, no I never said that. But I will say this, I just walked
up and was like "click" and then walked away and you were there for 10 minutes
and I got to lounge on the beach,
I thought about life, I planned my retirement. Like, you were still there
taking that picture.
-yeah and that was actually the point I was trying to make, is in photography
often expensive gear is just a matter of saving you time. So the d810 takes a great
picture in a second
and it took me like 15 minutes at the beach and then an hour of
post-processing at least to stitch together this panorama. The same holds
true for wildlife photography. Like you could get a big 600 millimeter f/4 lens for
fifteen thousand dollars and it would bring you closer to birds, or you could
get a cheap lens and hide in the bushes and spend a few more hours out
there taking a few thousand more pictures -or you could spend years befriending the birds .
-I just also wanted to show off, not only did I get more detail out of it, but I
got cleaner noise, like less noise.
I basically just whooped ya.
Totally whooped ya. -I don't feel that way, but I'm glad you do.
-You saw, it was a blind test and you picked yourself to lose. How humiliating. -I do feel humiliated.