nikonshooter Loc: Spartanburg, South Carolina

If I set the exposure, using "Backyard EOS for Nikon" so that my histogram (In BYEOS) shows zero clipping. That histogram is identical to the one I see in PS...pixel for pixel. I may be missing the point, but RAW imaging allows for some clipping recovery at both ends of the luminosity scale....and is the most forgiving on the darks.

Oknoder Loc: Western North Dakota

Within the firmware Nikon automatically clips the black point, there is no way around it other than hacking the firmware to limit this behavior, they used to also clip the white point which was dubbed the "star eater". I'll dig up a "real" raw image, and post it. They come out looking a tad pink/magenta, before any color correction is done. With my D800e I have no done a patch of the firmware as I haven't had the balls yet. My d5100 and maybe my d7000 have the patch installed. Only difference is that when I shut off my d800 the hack goes away as it only resides on the ram, in the others it's embedded in the firmware itself. The only real downside to using it, aside from if the camera breaks and Nikon sees you have been playing around they will refuse to fix it, is it greatly increased the noise because this is where why they clip it. For astro though I shoot darks and bias to eliminate this issue.

When they clip the black point they also take the image out of being linear too, I don't really understand all of that but when I was having problems calibrating my flats I found this to be the issue.

I'll post a couple of links for you to peruse if you feel like it.

Oknoder Loc: Western North Dakota

Sry kind of a PITA doing all this from my phone. Lol.

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3384710

nikonshooter Loc: Spartanburg, South Carolina

Interesting thread......Not that I entirely understood everything covered, but enough to know some Nikons, if not all, may replace detail with black to combat read noise. I can't even begin to imagine the need to take an image lasting 3 minutes let alone 5 with my D800e or D810a. If these were mono cameras and I opted for narrow band imaging that would be entirely different.

I may be blind but I think I get better images from the D800e which has been modified, than the D810a which is the so called, astro-imaging Nikon flagship camera. I attributed the D800e's performance to the heat reduction system that was added at Spencers when the camera was modified........something that the D810a does not have.

Actually, unless using the 8 inch SCT, my exposures are all 60 seconds or less.

Oknoder Loc: Western North Dakota

I have some in the tens but usually five is my average. A lot depends on your light pollution too if you are sky limited to just a minute or two noise can be next to impossible to eliminate. Now when we are paying jpgs it gets lost in the compression but when you print out at full resolution it becomes glaring.

I had Spenser's MOD a camera for me a few years back, I won't publicly go into the details but I was not a satisfied customer. On stripping down the camera they apply a heat sink to the back of the sensor plate (read aluminum foil). It did lower the TDP by a couple degrees though. Using a real heatsink, with a copper plate exiting the camera body with some form of cooling, either using a small maglev fan or TEC is the proper way to go. Since I use my 800 mostly in the field shooting regular photography adding some monstrosity to the side or bottom seemed out of the question. I have read that the guy running MonoMods is trying to place the TEC and controller into the battery grip so it can at least look fairly stock.

Personally I purchased a few broken D5100s in the hopes of getting one to work so I could try my hand at modifying one, only wrecked one sensor taking the protective glass off, have two more to experiment with. Worst case if I end up destroying them all is I'm out not even two hundred bucks. I have one completely working without the IR or AA filters, and I'm still able to achieve infinite focus with all the lenses I have tried with it. Plus the D5100 has the dark enable tool added right into the menu system, I just made a custom white balance though and let it go at that. Still haven't given it a real shakedown under the stars, this fall/winter has been rather hectic.

I'm supposed to be running Ethernet cable through the house not playing on the phone, but if you won't tell, I wont.
Matthew

CraigFair Loc: Santa Maria, CA.

What WB settings do you use???

Oknoder Loc: Western North Dakota

Cloudy but really that only applies to the small jpg that the camera shows you on the rear LCD, since I shoot in raw, WB settings are not applied till PP.

CraigFair Loc: Santa Maria, CA.

Yes I'm sorry I didn't specify what are the settings in Lightroom + & - numbers???

Oknoder Loc: Western North Dakota

I really don't use lightroom too often, except when editing many layers for lightpainting, and then I usually use a grey card for exact color, for each of the flashlight I will be using so they all come out with a similar color temp. Other than the directory service lightroom offers I see it more as a nice friendly GUI version of ACR. Since everything that lightroom does can be done in CameraRaw, I learned with ACR, so that's what I am more comfortable with. And I tend to lose my photos when in Lightroom, cause I tend to move them about in windows and LR loses track of them.

Matthew

nikonshooter Loc: Spartanburg, South Carolina

Every image I take (excepting astro images) are imported into LR. I have over 1.2 million images cataloged. I keyword at import. I maintain a catalog for each year for Sports, Weddings, Family, Landscape, Portraiture. I currently use 40 terabytes of storage distributed between two 5 bay Drobos and am running out of space. We will be adding a synology system this year - the Drobos have been a problem since their purchase 6 years ago. I keep my astro images on separate 5 Terabyte drives.

Regarding LR - again excepting Astro-Images I - I make 90 percent of my edits in LR - If I round trip to PS and back to LR....regardless of the tweaks I may make in PS, roundtripping almost doubles the file size. For that reason - I have all but abandoned camera raw with the exception of "smart objects" raw editing.

Like so many of you I have hard drives on top of hard drives - labeled by still difficult to find stuff. Since moving to LR - finding an image is a snap. The keywording is worth it's weight in gold!

Oknoder Loc: Western North Dakota

If you don't mind me asking what has been your issues with drobo, I currently am running two 800i's and was thinking of getting the 1200. These are all tied into my network and not directly attached, doubt that makes a difference though.