Hi. Im reasonably new to photography and am quite enjoying my b+w photography. My question to you is this - how do i increase the contrast "in camera". For example a night shot under street lamp, is there a way to darken the background and highlight the spotlight without "post-production"?
Assuming this is on your NX200, see page 61 of your manual, 'Picture Styles'. According to that, you can create a custom picture style that increases the contrast (and various other attributes) of the saved image.
Be aware that this is not really a recommended approach. By doing this in camera, you are throwing away data that you might wish you had, and can never recover it. When you do this in post-production, you keep the original image, and can decide the exact level of adjustment to make.
@abirkill Alexis - I am curious... I set up my own picture style in my camera (canon)... The process basically had me adjusting sliders - I upped contrast, saturation and sharpness I think... Overall I've liked the results... Occasionally I will use the default picture style for comparison purposes, but have generally stuck w my own...
Anyhow - I am not clear how this results in me having less info recorded about an image to play w in post... I get that it's difft info than I wld have had - but is it really less? Just curious and would really like to have a good understanding of what I am doing... Incidentally, I shoot jpeg (not RAW) if that makes a difference...
@northy You have silver efex don't you? If so, you should do a test and shoot raw images and then convert them to b&w using silver efex, you might be amazed at how much more control you have over the image in post. That being said if you like your workflow the way it is, shooting jpg and adjusting in camera with minimal post work then by all means stick with what works for you. I think that your photography rocks either way, you will always have more control with raw files but it does make for more post work which isn't everyones cup of tea.
@jsorensenart tx Jake... i did try RAW for a couple days back in the summer but got frustrated with the extra fiddling in LR which i haven't properly learned how to use... i've promised myself a course and then i will try again - just haven't had time as yet :(
and yes, i do have silver efex... maybe next week i'll play around with RAW and converting to b&w and see how it goes... no time this week!
@northy To understand why we need to get slightly technical about what those changes are actually doing -- apologies if you already know this.
Taking contrast as an example, what happens when contrast is increased is that the image histogram gets stretched out. Increasing contrast will make dark areas of the image get closer to black, and light areas of the image get closer to white.
The problem with doing this is that many scenes already have more contrast than the camera can capture, so the image (as it comes from the sensor) already has totally black areas and totally white areas. By telling the camera to increase the contrast as it saves the image to the card, it will also make areas that are close to black totally black, and areas that are close to white totally white.
What this means is that you have lost shadow and highlight detail -- the parts of the image that once were just very dark are now completely black, and there's nothing you can do to recover that information. The sensor captured that information, but it has been discarded by the camera when it applies your picture style.
By instead applying contrast adjustments in post-processing, such as in Lightroom, you can adjust both how much contrast to apply, and also by adjusting the exposure, how much shadow or highlight detail you lose. You are still losing information, but you are in control of what information you lose -- if you accidentally underexposed the image, you still have shadow detail that you can recover, and if you want to stop the sky from going totally white, you can drop the exposure a smidge and the highlight data is still present.
Saturation does a similar thing but specific to colour channels -- it will make something that is close to totally red, completely red. Ken Rockwell is a big proponent of this, so seeing saturation turned up to 11 in cameras is very common for people who read his site religiously. You can see the effect of turning the saturation up in-camera here:
In these examples, you can't recover the detail of the red areas in the first photo -- they're just solid red. The exact colour, the shading as it goes around the corner, and so on has been irretrievably lost.
Sharpening is, again, a destructive edit -- too much sharpening can introduce halo effects that are very difficult to remove. This is especially problematic when you have multiple lenses -- if you set a sharpening level in-camera for a lens that isn't very sharp, then it will oversharpen images taken with a better lens.
Let me be clear that none of these effects is in any way 'wrong' -- there's nothing wrong with adjusting the contrast, adjusting the saturation, or sharpening images -- I do all three of those on virtually every image that I take. And if you have no plans to touch your photos with post-processing software, then by all means adjust the in-camera settings. But if you are seriously into photography and post-process most or all of your images, I'd recommend considering your camera as a data capture device. When you use the camera, you are trying to get the best data possible -- you want as much tonal information, colour information, and so on, as you can capture from the scene. You can then decide when processing the image what effect you want, what data to 'throw away' by boosting contrast and saturation, how much sharpening to apply, and so on, starting from the best possible place with all of the data present. And if you don't like how it looks, you can try something else. If you do the same in camera, then you're stuck with it -- love it, or hate it.
Note that, if you are shooting in RAW, picture styles don't take effect on the RAW image, but will show when you preview the image in-camera. This can be the best of both worlds -- you can boost contrast and saturation a little in camera, and get a sneak peak on the camera's display of how the image might look when processed, but you also have the original image data saved in the RAW file.
Also, this is still a somewhat simplified explanation -- to really understand what the camera is doing you need to understand gamma curves, sensor colour response, and various other stuff that's very technical, even by my standards!
Picture Styles are actually used the other way by a lot of people who shoot video using their DSLRs -- by setting negative contrast and saturation values, you get even more data than the 'flat' styles that Canon provide, which allows a lot more creativity if you are post-processing videos. There's an excellent video showing the difference here:
When watching these clips, remember that the 'Canon standard picture style' here has a higher-than-desired contrast and saturation (and hence has lost detail) compared to the custom picture styles he demonstrates, which have a lower contrast and saturation (keeping more image data and allowing you to do more in post-processing).
Note that this is exactly the same process, even though this is focused on video clips rather than still images. You can do similar things with JPEGs -- by using negative contrast and saturation values, you can actually get more towards RAW-like processing -- but for still images, you might as well just use RAW if you're this serious. (Canon DSLRs, to the frustration of many filmmakers, cannot record RAW-format videos).
@abirkill thanks for the explanation, its really helpful. At this stage of my photography career im still trying to understand camera settings and composition so i think in camera is enough for me but its really useful to have a better understanding of how it all works! Thanks
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Be aware that this is not really a recommended approach. By doing this in camera, you are throwing away data that you might wish you had, and can never recover it. When you do this in post-production, you keep the original image, and can decide the exact level of adjustment to make.
Anyhow - I am not clear how this results in me having less info recorded about an image to play w in post... I get that it's difft info than I wld have had - but is it really less? Just curious and would really like to have a good understanding of what I am doing... Incidentally, I shoot jpeg (not RAW) if that makes a difference...
Tx lots!
and yes, i do have silver efex... maybe next week i'll play around with RAW and converting to b&w and see how it goes... no time this week!
Taking contrast as an example, what happens when contrast is increased is that the image histogram gets stretched out. Increasing contrast will make dark areas of the image get closer to black, and light areas of the image get closer to white.
The problem with doing this is that many scenes already have more contrast than the camera can capture, so the image (as it comes from the sensor) already has totally black areas and totally white areas. By telling the camera to increase the contrast as it saves the image to the card, it will also make areas that are close to black totally black, and areas that are close to white totally white.
What this means is that you have lost shadow and highlight detail -- the parts of the image that once were just very dark are now completely black, and there's nothing you can do to recover that information. The sensor captured that information, but it has been discarded by the camera when it applies your picture style.
By instead applying contrast adjustments in post-processing, such as in Lightroom, you can adjust both how much contrast to apply, and also by adjusting the exposure, how much shadow or highlight detail you lose. You are still losing information, but you are in control of what information you lose -- if you accidentally underexposed the image, you still have shadow detail that you can recover, and if you want to stop the sky from going totally white, you can drop the exposure a smidge and the highlight data is still present.
Saturation does a similar thing but specific to colour channels -- it will make something that is close to totally red, completely red. Ken Rockwell is a big proponent of this, so seeing saturation turned up to 11 in cameras is very common for people who read his site religiously. You can see the effect of turning the saturation up in-camera here:
http://sfcitizen.com/blog/2008/04/20/why-photographer-ken-rockwell-is-wrong-wrong-wrong-about-using-vivid-color-settings/
In these examples, you can't recover the detail of the red areas in the first photo -- they're just solid red. The exact colour, the shading as it goes around the corner, and so on has been irretrievably lost.
Sharpening is, again, a destructive edit -- too much sharpening can introduce halo effects that are very difficult to remove. This is especially problematic when you have multiple lenses -- if you set a sharpening level in-camera for a lens that isn't very sharp, then it will oversharpen images taken with a better lens.
Let me be clear that none of these effects is in any way 'wrong' -- there's nothing wrong with adjusting the contrast, adjusting the saturation, or sharpening images -- I do all three of those on virtually every image that I take. And if you have no plans to touch your photos with post-processing software, then by all means adjust the in-camera settings. But if you are seriously into photography and post-process most or all of your images, I'd recommend considering your camera as a data capture device. When you use the camera, you are trying to get the best data possible -- you want as much tonal information, colour information, and so on, as you can capture from the scene. You can then decide when processing the image what effect you want, what data to 'throw away' by boosting contrast and saturation, how much sharpening to apply, and so on, starting from the best possible place with all of the data present. And if you don't like how it looks, you can try something else. If you do the same in camera, then you're stuck with it -- love it, or hate it.
Note that, if you are shooting in RAW, picture styles don't take effect on the RAW image, but will show when you preview the image in-camera. This can be the best of both worlds -- you can boost contrast and saturation a little in camera, and get a sneak peak on the camera's display of how the image might look when processed, but you also have the original image data saved in the RAW file.
Also, this is still a somewhat simplified explanation -- to really understand what the camera is doing you need to understand gamma curves, sensor colour response, and various other stuff that's very technical, even by my standards!
Picture Styles are actually used the other way by a lot of people who shoot video using their DSLRs -- by setting negative contrast and saturation values, you get even more data than the 'flat' styles that Canon provide, which allows a lot more creativity if you are post-processing videos. There's an excellent video showing the difference here:
http://vimeo.com/7256322
When watching these clips, remember that the 'Canon standard picture style' here has a higher-than-desired contrast and saturation (and hence has lost detail) compared to the custom picture styles he demonstrates, which have a lower contrast and saturation (keeping more image data and allowing you to do more in post-processing).
Note that this is exactly the same process, even though this is focused on video clips rather than still images. You can do similar things with JPEGs -- by using negative contrast and saturation values, you can actually get more towards RAW-like processing -- but for still images, you might as well just use RAW if you're this serious. (Canon DSLRs, to the frustration of many filmmakers, cannot record RAW-format videos).
Let me know if you have any questions!