Sony a6500, Canon EF400mm lens, Canon 1.4x, Clear Image Zoom.. (Page 2): Thanks Gessman and good question - is jpg OK if you have your act together when you shoot. Maybe it is. For me...

TedC

Thanks Gessman and good question - is jpg OK if you have your act together when you shoot. Maybe it is. For me, the main thing that RAW gives me with my Canon is that photos tend to be too yellow with indoor light, so I can adjust the color temperature with perfection in RAW. But most outdoor photos have color temperature that I find good. So maybe, Fine JPG would be OK for general shooting, then get Raw if you think you have the epic landscape or are working indoors for portraits etc. I'll have to learn what the Sony gives me. But I like your point - CIZ may get you precious zoom in a variety of circumstances. Important to me where the idea is to go mirrorless for travel so the package is light and extra lenses are not on the menu.

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

gessman wrote:

Yep, your a6000 with a 300mm lens should/will go u... (show quote)

The amount of IQ loss using CIZ is a function of the detail in the image. Very simple objects with perfectly predictable edges work best. Complex scenes with fine detail suffer a lot. It all boils down to how accurate the resizing algorithm can invent new pixels. In the case of 2.0x, it is inventing 3 new pixels for every 1 existing pixel. If the image has lots of fine detail, these new pixels may be really bad.

gessman Loc: Colorado

TedC wrote:

Thanks Gessman and good question - is jpg OK if yo... (show quote)

It sounds like you're not a big fan of setting a custom white balance when you change light sources. You can assign that to a custom function button too, you know. There's no reason to let a little incandescent light ruin your indoor jpgs, or have I misunderstood something.

gessman Loc: Colorado

JimH123 wrote:

The amount of IQ loss using CIZ is a function of the detail in the image. Very simple objects with perfectly predictable edges work best. Complex scenes with fine detail suffer a lot. It all boils down to how accurate the resizing algorithm can invent new pixels. In the case of 2.0x, it is inventing 3 new pixels for every 1 existing pixel. If the image has lots of fine detail, these new pixels may be really bad.

That's good information that I haven't previously encountered. I tend to avoid shooting the kind of shots you describe as being problematic so that may be why I haven't encountered the problem in my somewhat limited use of CIZ. It makes perfect sense. I need to do some testing so I'll know when to avoid using it and shoot no paisley 'til then. :) Thanks for the heads up.

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

gessman wrote:

That's good information that I haven't previously encountered. I tend to avoid shooting the kind of shots you describe as being problematic so that may be why I haven't encountered the problem in my somewhat limited use of CIZ. It makes perfect sense. I need to do some testing so I'll know when to avoid using it and shoot no paisley 'til then. :) Thanks for the heads up.

Actually, paisley is predictable enough that it will probably be OK. What can look bad, for example, is thick brush in which you have opening for a bird shot. The tangled brush will look really bad. And not just brush. Bark on trees, wispy grass, etc. Basically stuff that has unpredictability to it.

gessman Loc: Colorado

JimH123 wrote:

Actually, paisley is predictable enough that it will probably be OK. What can look bad, for example, is thick brush in which you have opening for a bird shot. The tangled brush will look really bad. And not just brush. Bark on trees, wispy grass, etc. Basically stuff that has unpredictability to it.

Thanks again. I'll be anxious to put it to a test to see what it it can handle and what it can't.

imagemeister Loc: mid east Florida

gessman wrote:

Thanks again. I'll be anxious to put it to a test to see what it it can handle and what it can't.

Some how I have missed this posting gessman

I have been a STRONG advocate for CIZ for some 3 years now - but no-one wants to listen and people think I am some kind of crack-pot photographer !

I first used CIZ with my Canon 300 2.8 with adapter ( manual focus) and compared it to using the Canon 2X on the 300. The results for me were ASTOUNDING - and game changing ! On highly detailed subjects the "look" of CIZ is slightly different from pure optical rendering - and in my mind is not better or worse - just "different" - more artistic even maybe !

So, there are many many people looking for extra "reach" with bigger more expensive lenses and light robbing tele-extenders (and I just smile) - when they could be using what they already have !

If you are a snobby raw user, yes you can do the same thing as CIZ by cropping and using well applied pixel enlargement software - but it is a PITA compared to in camera CIZ !

Sony A77II and Sigma 100-300 f4 @300f4, 1.7X CIZ ( 510mm), ISO 320, 1/500 from my body pod

(Download)

gessman Loc: Colorado

imagemeister wrote:

Some how I have missed this posting gessman img ... (show quote)

I hear you and it was in some of your comments that I became aware of the presence and potential impact of CIZ about the time I got an a6000 but I didn't use it for some time. I figure the main reason most people aren't aware of CIZ has to do with the potential for overload and/or a propensity away from very much experimentation. In my case, although I am an experimenter, to a degree, but nothing to the extent you are, I hit a wall inside the Sony menu and had a serious case of overload and didn't even want to read anymore about any of it. I've always disliked reading and the older I get, the more I dislike it. I go through the menu in a new camera and see what's familiar and then look for the Cliff Notes on what I don't understand. A concept like CIZ flies right over my head, possibly as I think, "well, Nikon doesn't have it and Canon doesn't have and Sony makes stereo stuff, so...

Another tendency away from learning about all the bells and whistles of a new camera, for an old codger like me, is an underlying urge to, as rapidly as possible, reduce such a camera to the bare basics, roughly returning it to the functionality of cameras like a Canon F1 or Nikon F2 so we can speak to the basic camera without all the bells and whistles getting in our way and often we just don't get around to getting back to all the fluff like CIZ unless we get hit over the head to wake us up. You're a man ahead of the pack, experimenting a lot, often building your own "Rube Goldberg" inventions, and as such I'm sure you have grown to occasionally expect to be accused of being a crackpot. That's how it works. Surely if you are using a camera in ways that only Jules Verne or perhaps "George Jetson" could do, there's got to be something wrong with you.

I recall when I was trying to first set up wifi to remotely control my 5d2, a mere 7 to 8 years ago, I remarked to the people who first came up with the software to facilitate that, how nice it was to put my 5d2 on a tripod buried up to the 2nd knuckle in snow as I sat in a warm car with my phone controlling every aspect of my camera except zooming the lens and just how nice it would be if I could also zoom. They looked at me like I was an idiot, laughed, and said, " that'll never happen because there's no connection that'll permit it." But here we are a few years later and Sony has come up with the ability to not only zoom a lens remotely but they figured out how to effectively zoom even a non-zoom lens. It's crazy and hard to believe until you've tried CIZ. It's the answer, as you said, to getting more reach without spending a dime if you shoot Sony. When I get a chance I do tell people about it but since I'm no photographer, if they want some examples, I just send them to your Fine Arts America site as a testimonial. LOL. But, no, seriously...

a6k Loc: Detroit & Sanibel

Snobby or not, CIZ is not available on the a6500 when using either raw or raw+JPG and it is for the reasons guessed at earlier. If I took this stuff personally (I don't) I would want to respond that you don't need to be a snob to understand the value of shooting raw. But nice Tiger all the same.

CIZ makes a lot of sense for video on that camera but for nature, not so much. A fellow hogger pointed out to me the problem with how CIZ works when looking at patterns such as nature where the CIZ database and/or program just don't get it. I tried a few test shots and it did not take much to convince me he or she was correct. Consequently, I started looking at how to enlarge a picture and interpolate the missing pixels. The reason is that unless you are using a Nikon Coolpix P900 the bird is very often not close enough.

I cannot claim to have tested every possible application but so far, CaptureOne stands out a giving superior results when significantly up-sizing a photo. I am a compulsive pixel peeper so this was a fairly demanding set of comparisons. I used a shot of a frilly plant with lots of very fine detail as my test subject. And yes, I did include ON1 ReSize 10 in my tests. I also used, if I recall, Preview, Photos, Luminar, LightRoom, Darktable, RawTherapee and maybe more.

Again, it's just my version of truth, but the end result for virtual doubling of the focal length was best when shooting raw, cropping as appropriate and up-sizing with CaptureOne 10 or 11 as needed. CIZ works well in some cases and is better than simple digital zoom for video, usually. But I suggest that anyone who wants to use it for birds or similarly challenging subject should replicate my tests and see for themselves.

imagemeister Loc: mid east Florida

a6k wrote:

Snobby or not, CIZ is not available on the a6500 w... (show quote)

Or, just look at my Tiger .....

But then some people are masochistic and like to jump through post processing hoops.

..

gessman Loc: Colorado

a6k wrote:

Snobby or not, CIZ is not available on the a6500 w... (show quote)

Well, since I didn't use the "S" word and know well the value of shooting Raw as I'm sure Imagemeister does, I won't respond to that and with regard to the rest about when to and when not to use CIZ, I suppose we learn over time what works and what doesn't and I guess CIZ is like most other things in that experience is a good teacher. It sounds like you've done your homework and I sincerely appreciate you sharing your results with us. It's a little hard though, to determine just what the value of your shared knowledge is about CIZ based on your description of the subjects you used given that I might ordinarily shoot entirely different subject matter.

I went to look at the images you've posted to see how and what you shoot and wasn't able to determine anything from that one shot you posted earlier. Perhaps we won't encounter the same maladies so it looks like I'll just have to learn everything the hard way. I'm certainly not going to avoid using CIZ when a moose or elk is on the horizon a few hundred yards away and I need more lens I don't have to get a usable shot. In fact, the only time I'll avoid it until I know more how it will affect my shots will be in extremely important in perceived one-off situations of a dire nature that I cannot now even imagine. I don't shoot very much "small frilly" stuff as you described it and can't imagine that to be a problem for me. I guess I'll just use CIZ when it seems to be appropriate and take my lumps if I get any. In a minimalist sort of way, I tend to shoot larger targets and isolate my subject matter when possible so maybe I won't have to take too many lumps before learning what it can and cannot do. Thanks for your noble response to the issue.

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

WessoJPEG wrote:

out of focus.

Well, it hard to tell they are out of focus, or just suffering with some camera shake. Photoshop's Shake Reduction filter can often bring shots like these into a much sharper focus.

Another SW App that can do quite a job with Image Shake is Franzis Sharpen Pro. It regularly goes on sale. One thing I find with it is the auto setting is too agressive. I usually just do it manually.

gessman Loc: Colorado

JimH123 wrote:

Well, it hard to tell they are out of focus, or just suffering with some camera shake. Photoshop's Shake Reduction filter can often bring shots like these into a much sharper focus.

Another SW App that can do quite a job with Image Shake is Franzis Sharpen Pro. It regularly goes on sale. One thing I find with it is the auto setting is too agressive. I usually just do it manually.

Yep, they're pretty bad alright. I appreciate the information about shake reduction and will sure check it out. I keep hearing that "focus" is what it is and cannot be improved upon and must admit that I have tried "In-Focus" with little improvement. I don't think I'm normally that sloppy, as I think I explained a couple of times. There were all kinds of things going on with those shots and they never really had a chance, mild wind, shooting through a window screen, shooting way below the 1x lens max, you name it. I did try to emphasize to not pay as much attention to the images but rather read the text for my intended messages. ...and yes, I know, I could and should have posted better images. Likely will next time. Lesson learned.

It's clear that sharp focus would be more in demand with the way you shoot, scads of small dots of light far away so everything has to be very sharp for it to work. I haven't done much of your type of shooting but did shoot a bunch of rolls of film back in March of '96 when Hale Bopp Comet came through. Like it was from the St. Pete Beach in Florida when Haley's passed over in the mid-'80s, I couldn't see much of from in Denver so on the outside chance that it would make a difference, I drove up to around 12,000 ft. elevation on Mt. Evans and got some pretty decent shots with a Nikon FA and a Vivitar Series 1 28-80mm, somewhere around several rolls without trying to be either specific or vague about it. I posted a thread with some shots in it back in September 2011 just after this forum got started, if you're interested. There's probably a terrible number of ways you can tear me up in that thread and feel free to have at it

- http://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-1643-1.html

SteveG Loc: Norh Carolina

gessman wrote:

This is a not so scientific or, "a quick and dirty," overview of what the combination of features in the subject line can do when combined using a Sigma MC-11 adapter. There's been talk and this is an attempt to clarify what the outcome may be. It is also noteworthy that I have autofocus with this combination of features all the way up to 1680mm and only 1 stop of light loss from the added 1.4x TC.
That is pretty impressive! I don't know how someone could claim it doesn't do anything! Great for out bird shooting friend out there for sure! Thanks for putting this together!

I apologize for the shabby subject matter but I was sitting inside my house and had the idea for this thread. The rope is ten feet on the other side of the window I shot through which was about forty feet from where I was sitting or roughly 50 feet from the camera.

These shots were handheld and with me holding the gear during the shots there's lots of room for improvement. This Canon EF400mm f/5.6L lens is the non-image stabilized (IS) version but the Sony body has in-body-image-stabilization and the reason I got it was in hopes it would add IS and let me have that advantage with the lens for the first time since I bought it in the late '90s to use on EOS film cameras. The purpose of this test was to see just how well the IS performed on the lens under different shooting circumstances.

The first shot below was using just the 400mm lens on the a6500 which, being a crop body offers up a Field of View (FOV) of 600mm as most everyone will know. The second shot was to demonstrate what using the maximum zoom of Sony's Clear Image Zoom (CIZ) which would give a FOV of 1200mm. Third, I put my Canon EF1.4x II Teleconverter on which gave me a field of view of 840mm, and finally I gave it max CIZ which boosted the FOV up to 1680mm, again, with all shots handheld, not to be boastful but to test the effectiveness of the IBIS in the a6500. I used shutter priority at 1/500th and auto iso. All the data is in the exif of each shot.

If there's anyone out there who has been wondering about these issues, hopefully this will provide some answers. My personal assessment is that, being a hobbyist non-pixel peeper that I am, this combo will do very nicely for wildlife and with somewhere around 11 frames per second, I think I might even luck out and occasionally catch some distant wildlife action or perhaps even a bird in flight with this rig that weighs under 5 pounds.

These images have been cut down in size so they will load on uhh in the download mode. Bear in mind that I am about to be 81 in a few days and am not interested in seeing how much I can carry or if I can get better shots than others but just get out there and enjoy myself and have enough reach to stay out of harm's way at this point. I think this setup does those things for me very nicely.

This is a not so scientific or, "a quick and ... (show quote)

gessman Loc: Colorado

SteveG made a comment on my opening post in this thread but somehow it got tacked onto the end of my first paragraph and got swallowed up so it looks like it's part of my comments. Having seen a couple of youtube videos that denied that Sony's CIZ didn't do anything and therefore had no usefulness, SteveG's comment in response to my entire thread was:

"That is pretty impressive! I don't know how someone could claim it doesn't do anything! Great for out bird shooting friend out there for sure! Thanks for putting this together!