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Toronto's Other Skylines
- Thread starter Midtown Urbanist
- Start date
someMidTowner
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
North York: Night-Day by Jack Landau, on Flickr
Full Metal Junkie
Active Member
Wow, someone's been practicing their photography and editing skills during the lockdown!
someMidTowner
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
and for 10 years before too
Full Metal Junkie
Active Member
One of those rare days when you can almost make out Mississauga skyline through the haze and the smog all the way from Humber Bay Shores:
Full Metal Junkie
Active Member
Technically, this also qualifies as Mississauga skyline
Full Metal Junkie
Active Member
I've been using MCC skyline as my test subject lately in my quest to refurbish my 10-yr-old DSLR. I got my hands on one of them circular polarising filters today. My oh my, what a difference does it make to the haze. Once you dial in the angle, it's almost like "poof!" and the haze disappears:
However, it gives some sort of a dirty yellowish brown to the sky and the clouds, the signature circular polarizer look. I can't get it out in post with temperature adjustments. Do any photography buffs out there have any experience with this? Is the color shift just something you have to accept?
However, it gives some sort of a dirty yellowish brown to the sky and the clouds, the signature circular polarizer look. I can't get it out in post with temperature adjustments. Do any photography buffs out there have any experience with this? Is the color shift just something you have to accept?
someMidTowner
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nope, never accept it. Many of my filters have colour cast and you can individually tweak colours in photoshop! You can also divide your image into different components, for instance, I often treat the sky, foreground, and background as individual images. Magic wand tool on photoshop makes all of this easy.
This is just a minute of playing around with a scaled down jpg, so I'm sure you could get it even cleaner if you spend some time on it
Full Metal Junkie
Active Member
Ah, if only I could use photoshop... I'm a technology-averse millennial that lives in a car-free, cable-TV-free, landline-free and PC-free household. The only piece of computational technology I own is the cellphone in my pocket. This is partly the reason why my DSLR sat in a drawer collecting dust for the last 6 years - no computer to edit the photos on. What I'm trying to do with it right now is to somehow pair it to my phone so that I am able to upload and edit photos on the said phone on the go. As far as the mobile editing software goes, there is Adobe Lightroom and Google Snapseed photo editing apps that offer powerful photo development tools for global color and lighting corrections. Just nothing as fancy as a magic wand in photoshop though.
Oh well, at this point the tint corrections are the least of my problems with my camera. I don't know what's wrong with it. Wet-cleaning the sensor certainly did the trick to remove the "bubble" artefacts from the image. However, pictures are still super noisy even at ISO 100 and seem to be out of focus all the time. It used to take delicious-looking sharp shots, and now I don't even know whether it's something wrong with the body or the lens. Anyway, I digress...
someMidTowner
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Those apps are all very basic in functionality compared to the real thing. I wouldn't call them powerful, and the localized hue adjustments aren't usually enough to deal with filter cast.
What F/stop though? If it's ISO 100 and F cranked to 22 you might not be getting fast enough shutter speed for handheld
Full Metal Junkie
Active Member
I generally set it to F11 for landscapes (a good compromise between the depth of field and minimal chromatic aberations for my given lens) My previous shot was F11, 1/60s exposure, ISO100, semistabilized against a balcony railing. Here is what I'm talking about:
RAW:
Edited:
The amount of graining and color noise on the raw image is ridiculous for low ISO. I have to sacrifice clarity/sharpness to remove the noise, but that sharpness was never there to begin with. Anyways, one day I'll figure it out. Or maybe I shouldn't expect my 10-yr-old DSLR to perform any better than my 2-yr-old cellphone, who knows?
someMidTowner
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Depends on the DSLR and the lens. Not all are created equal. Kit lenses like the 18-55 most lower-end DSLRs come with out of the box are notoriously bad for grain, while if you slap on a Canon L series lens suddenly the photos are crisp as can be. I have a retired and busted up 5D Mk II bought in 2012 (but the model is from 09) that could easily outperform my pixel 4 or any iPhone out there, but it's like 3 bricks glued together.I generally set it to F11 for landscapes (a good compromise between the depth of field and minimal chromatic aberations for my given lens) My previous shot was F11, 1/60s exposure, ISO100, semistabilized against a balcony railing. Here is what I'm talking about:
RAW:
View attachment 287570
Edited:
View attachment 287572
The amount of graining and color noise on the raw image is ridiculous for low ISO. I have to sacrifice clarity/sharpness to remove the noise, but that sharpness was never there to begin with. Anyways, one day I'll figure it out. Or maybe I shouldn't expect my 10-yr-old DSLR to perform any better than my 2-yr-old cellphone, who knows?
Full Metal Junkie
Active Member
Yeah, what I'm trying to work with is nothing as refined as a 5D with an L-series lens. I have an old Canon Rebel T3i with an average EF-S 18-200mm lens on it. As of now, I still think my Pixel 3 phone takes better shots due to its HDR capability built-in. But I try to take out my Rebel out for a spin once in a while when I'm missing that optical zoom capability of a 200mm or when I would like to have some real non-plasticky bokeh.
If I was 100% sure that the image quality issues are due to the body, I would upgrade it to something more modern that fits my lens, which IMHO is the most universal lens one might have. It's just that I'm still not convinced that the body is the issue. After all, I put that lens through things that no lens should ever go through.
Logan
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gregv
Active Member
My usual shot from Old Mill toward Humber Bay on this snowy Christmas Day.
