squirrel ad absurdum

cmr164

Over in furry friend tmlphoto posted a really cool shot, but when I looked at it un reduced I found a bunch of artifacts and crud as seen from the following crop:


I took a look at the data in the file and found:
10d, 100-400L at 400mm, ISO400, wide open at f5.6, a -.5 exposure adustment, and 1/350th.

Post processing (in/out of camera): Exposure -0.40, Brightness 50, Contrast +33, Saturation +4, Sharpness 25, Noise Reduction 25

So in that thread I asked for and was sent the raw CRW file and was given the info that the photo had been cropped. I rather think the fact that the image was resized up after being cropped was the problem along wih some agressive default settings as shown above.

Here are an assortment of results covering jpg converted from the CRW by EOS Viewer, jpg extracted from the CRW, and 16bit tif converted from the CRW by PS CS.

All of the above settings have been zeroed and each sample is presented as a jpg with no post at all and a 2nd sample with USM of 124% radius 0.7 Threshold 1. All are 100% with no resizing just crops.

From the extracted JPG:



Now with the USM:


Then from the converted jpg.
(note: the converted jpg is 4.2M vs 2.4M for the extracted jpg)
Also not that while EOS Viewer says it can turn off sharpening it seems to apply the sharpness, contraast, and saturation settings. DPP does not work with CRW files only with the pro CR2 files so PS Raw or C1 seem like the only choice.


With the above USM settings:




Note that here we cut out the in camera settings. I really recommend not using in camera sharpening or noise reduction.

And finally the 16bit tiffs. I did nothing with the levels here so visually they are not as contrasty or saturated, but play with them with levels or other adjustments and they are way superior to the jpgs in terms of embedded information.

http://www.iisc.com/dgrin/squirrel/CRW_8220ps_c.tif

And with USM

http://www.iisc.com/dgrin/squirrel/CRW_8220ps_cs.tif