Graduated Neutral Density Filters (Page 2): You are combining ND's and grad ND's together. No one has said anything like that. ND's...still need them...they are great. Grad ND's...not...

Canisdirus

Strodav wrote:

Why do you think the professional photographers ru... (show quote)

You are combining ND's and grad ND's together.
No one has said anything like that.

ND's...still need them...they are great.
Grad ND's...not needed too much at all. Can be done PP...easily...and you aren't tied into anything when you begin...options.

Grad ND's are sort of the primary reason for the rectangular filter kit.

So...no need for that system without grad ND's...since screw in now are the better option...and cheaper I might add...and smaller...etc.

Shooting video...get a matte box..no doubt.

George in McKinney Loc: McKinney, Texas

catterar wrote:

I have registered for a landscape photography workshop. One item that they strongly recommend that I bring is a set of graduated neutral density filters, one 2 stop and one 4 stop. One of my lenses is a Tokina 11-16mm ultrawide. I am concerned about vignetting with this lens. Before I buy anything, does anyone have any suggestions for a system that will work with this lens?
Thanks in advance.

Take a look at the NISI system, available through B&H. I have done a lot of research and decided on the NISI S6 which is a 150mm wide system to control vignetting on the full frame 14mm lens. NISI filters are fabricated from optical quality glass, the cheaper filters and some of the higher end filters are are fabricated with plastics. The NISI S6 system comes with a circular polarizer(three different options available) Talk to someone at B&H about the NISI S6 neutral density/graduated neutral density filter system. My order is to be delivered on the 12th, this month. Also ask B&H about the NISI V6 system(100mm wide filters system for your lens). If it would work for your Tokina, the NISI V6 system is less expensive, compared to the NISI S6 system. The holder can be ordered without a polarizer if necessary and added later if funds are not available at this time. I wish you well, George

uhaas2009

My first ND I bought over eBay the older version of breakthrough. What I know that those filter are color neutral and sharp enough. What I didn’t know how much stops I really needed and what system would made sense to use. A friend of mine Mention about https://kasefilters.com/kase-armour-100mm-system
It’s magic and I don’t have to screw, bush or what ever…..yes it’s expensive but it is worth every time I use it.

kymarto Loc: Portland OR and Milan Italy

Strodav wrote:

Why do you thinFirk the professional photographers... (show quote)

Let's review for a minute GNDs vs brackets post processed. Spoiler: there is not a single advantage to using GNDs.

The point of using a GND is to reduce the brightness of some part of the image, usually the sky. A GND has a clear section and a section with a certain strength of neutral density. There is a transition gradient between the two sections. These parameter are fixed. One filter has one density and one gradient. Densities are commonly 1-4 stops, and gradients are commonly either soft or hard. In the old days, and still in film, you had to have a whole set in both gradients because different subjects demand different parameters. For a flat horizon, for instance, like a seascape, you want a hard gradient because the two sections of the scene are clearly and sharply delineated, and a soft gradient would look unnatural. Likewise, for a scene where the transition is irregular, like mountains, you want a soft gradient so as not to have a line across features on the horizon. And depending on the effect you want, and the difference in light intensity between the dark and light areas, you need different densities. So to do this right, you need maybe six filters, if not eight.

Now, your transition is not always going to be in the middle, or level, so you need to have a long filter in order to be able to move it up and down to place the transition where you need it depending on your composition. And you need a holder that allows for vertical movement and ideally also rotation.

Unless you want to break the bank and buy Tiffen 4x5 filters, you will end up with plastic filters, which are easily damaged. You have to carry this around with you everywhere and be very careful with them, and you will spend a lot of money.

And they are extremely limited. You cannot change the gradient, and it is always straight. The image is always going to look unnatural because the transition, apart from a flat desert or ocean, will have features that are not flat, and which will be bisected by the transition of the filter. And the difference in exposure will be determined by the filter.

The alternative is to shoot two frames, one correctly exposed for the foreground, and one for the sky. Best on tripod, but they can also be quite easily aligned even hand held. In Photoshop, or some other image editor that allows layering, make two layers: one with the foreground exposure and one with the background exposure. On the top layer create a layer mask. With that layer mask, you can paint the transition exactly as needed, with pixel precision if necessary, to follow exactly the terrain. You can set the transition exactly as you want it painting with reduced flow and opacity. And best of all, it is all non-destructive and reversible. If you make a mistake you can paint the reverse, as many times as necessary, until it is exactly as you want it.

Not that the mask has been created, the real fun begins. You can now adjust the parameters of the two layers independently: exposure, whites, blacks, saturation, contrast, color balance, highlights, shadows--everything. You can fine tune the sky without touching the foreground, or vice versa.

You save time setting up the filters, you save money, you improve the image quality because you don't have more stuff over the lens, you don't have to lug the filters around and baby them. There is not a single reason for using GNDs, and many for not using them.

Strodav Loc: Houston, Tx

kymarto wrote:

Let's review for a minute GNDs vs brackets post processed. Spoiler: there is not a single advantage to using GNDs.

The point of using a GND is to reduce the brightness of some part of the image, usually the sky. A GND has a clear section and a section with a certain strength of neutral density. There is a transition gradient between the two sections. These parameter are fixed. One filter has one density and one gradient. Densities are commonly 1-4 stops, and gradients are commonly either soft or hard. In the old days, and still in film, you had to have a whole set in both gradients because different subjects demand different parameters. For a flat horizon, for instance, like a seascape, you want a hard gradient because the two sections of the scene are clearly and sharply delineated, and a soft gradient would look unnatural. Likewise, for a scene where the transition is irregular, like mountains, you want a soft gradient so as not to have a line across features on the horizon. And depending on the effect you want, and the difference in light intensity between the dark and light areas, you need different densities. So to do this right, you need maybe six filters, if not eight.

Now, your transition is not always going to be in the middle, or level, so you need to have a long filter in order to be able to move it up and down to place the transition where you need it depending on your composition. And you need a holder that allows for vertical movement and ideally also rotation.

Unless you want to break the bank and buy Tiffen 4x5 filters, you will end up with plastic filters, which are easily damaged. You have to carry this around with you everywhere and be very careful with them, and you will spend a lot of money.

And they are extremely limited. You cannot change the gradient, and it is always straight. The image is always going to look unnatural because the transition, apart from a flat desert or ocean, will have features that are not flat, and which will be bisected by the transition of the filter. And the difference in exposure will be determined by the filter.

The alternative is to shoot two frames, one correctly exposed for the foreground, and one for the sky. Best on tripod, but they can also be quite easily aligned even hand held. In Photoshop, or some other image editor that allows layering, make two layers: one with the foreground exposure and one with the background exposure. On the top layer create a layer mask. With that layer mask, you can paint the transition exactly as needed, with pixel precision if necessary, to follow exactly the terrain. You can set the transition exactly as you want it painting with reduced flow and opacity. And best of all, it is all non-destructive and reversible. If you make a mistake you can paint the reverse, as many times as necessary, until it is exactly as you want it.

Not that the mask has been created, the real fun begins. You can now adjust the parameters of the two layers independently: exposure, whites, blacks, saturation, contrast, color balance, highlights, shadows--everything. You can fine tune the sky without touching the foreground, or vice versa.

You save time setting up the filters, you save money, you improve the image quality because you don't have more stuff over the lens, you don't have to lug the filters around and baby them. There is not a single reason for using GNDs, and many for not using them.

Let's review for a minute GNDs vs brackets post pr... (show quote)

In a landscape workshop we talked a lot about storytelling and how to achieve the feeling of depth in landscape photography. One way is to get close, middle, and far objects in sharp focus (see Bryan Peterson's "Exposure Solutions"). With a film camera, you can use very small apertures with long exposures to achieve this, but with digital cameras, especially high mp cameras, you run into diffraction problems, say, somewhere after f/8. One good solution is focus stacking. Take 3, to maybe 5 shots, focusing from very close (a few feet), mid distance, then infinity (usually) then focus stack in post. How can I do that in an HDR situation? Bracket 3 to 5 shots close, 3 to five shots mid distance, then 3 to 5 shots at infinity. That's a total of 9 to 15 images that have to be properly merged and focus stacked. No thank you. To me, getting it as close to right in camera so I can to minimize the time I spend in post is a goal. I'd rather be out taking pictures.

I like taking pictures of sunsets, especially when the sun is surrounded by clouds or a bit covered by clouds with the bottom of the sun right at or just dipping slightly below the horizon. I find I get a lot better results taking a spot reading of the sky away from the sun, then a spot reading of the landscape below the sky then using a GND filter equal to the difference as compared to bracketing and merging in post. The GND allows me to really bring out the color in clouds around the sun and to stop or significantly reduce the flare I could get from the sun as well as bring color to the sun instead of it being a big white dot. You can't get the same result by bracketing and blending in post without a lot of really hard tedious work including replacing the sun with a filled shape. I know, I've done it. Too much time and effort to get it looking natural.

I believe the long time professional landscape photographers who conducted the workshop I attended, and the ones who conducted the online courses, shared their best techniques with us. For the price, they better have. I think I'll stick with what they taught me and one of the very first things we went over was filter systems and how they all highly recommend rectangular filter systems with ND, and both hard and soft GND filters. It's what they use. I'm not trying to convince anyone to change what they are doing, just to bring a full range of ideas to those who just might be getting into a particular subject. Isn't that what these forums are for?

Spirit Vision Photography Loc: Behind a Camera.

I use the Cokin P holder, and the rectangular Hi-Tech filters.

https://formatt-hitechusa.com/collections/optical-resin-filters

Spirit Vision Photography Loc: Behind a Camera.

kymarto wrote:

Let's review for a minute GNDs vs brackets post processed. Spoiler: there is not a single advantage to using GNDs.

The point of using a GND is to reduce the brightness of some part of the image, usually the sky. A GND has a clear section and a section with a certain strength of neutral density. There is a transition gradient between the two sections. These parameter are fixed. One filter has one density and one gradient. Densities are commonly 1-4 stops, and gradients are commonly either soft or hard. In the old days, and still in film, you had to have a whole set in both gradients because different subjects demand different parameters. For a flat horizon, for instance, like a seascape, you want a hard gradient because the two sections of the scene are clearly and sharply delineated, and a soft gradient would look unnatural. Likewise, for a scene where the transition is irregular, like mountains, you want a soft gradient so as not to have a line across features on the horizon. And depending on the effect you want, and the difference in light intensity between the dark and light areas, you need different densities. So to do this right, you need maybe six filters, if not eight.

Now, your transition is not always going to be in the middle, or level, so you need to have a long filter in order to be able to move it up and down to place the transition where you need it depending on your composition. And you need a holder that allows for vertical movement and ideally also rotation.

Unless you want to break the bank and buy Tiffen 4x5 filters, you will end up with plastic filters, which are easily damaged. You have to carry this around with you everywhere and be very careful with them, and you will spend a lot of money.

And they are extremely limited. You cannot change the gradient, and it is always straight. The image is always going to look unnatural because the transition, apart from a flat desert or ocean, will have features that are not flat, and which will be bisected by the transition of the filter. And the difference in exposure will be determined by the filter.

The alternative is to shoot two frames, one correctly exposed for the foreground, and one for the sky. Best on tripod, but they can also be quite easily aligned even hand held. In Photoshop, or some other image editor that allows layering, make two layers: one with the foreground exposure and one with the background exposure. On the top layer create a layer mask. With that layer mask, you can paint the transition exactly as needed, with pixel precision if necessary, to follow exactly the terrain. You can set the transition exactly as you want it painting with reduced flow and opacity. And best of all, it is all non-destructive and reversible. If you make a mistake you can paint the reverse, as many times as necessary, until it is exactly as you want it.

Not that the mask has been created, the real fun begins. You can now adjust the parameters of the two layers independently: exposure, whites, blacks, saturation, contrast, color balance, highlights, shadows--everything. You can fine tune the sky without touching the foreground, or vice versa.

You save time setting up the filters, you save money, you improve the image quality because you don't have more stuff over the lens, you don't have to lug the filters around and baby them. There is not a single reason for using GNDs, and many for not using them.

Let's review for a minute GNDs vs brackets post pr... (show quote)

🙄

kymarto Loc: Portland OR and Milan Italy

Strodav wrote:

In a landscape workshop we talked a lot about storytelling and how to achieve the feeling of depth in landscape photography. One way is to get close, middle, and far objects in sharp focus (see Bryan Peterson's "Exposure Solutions"). With a film camera, you can use very small apertures with long exposures to achieve this, but with digital cameras, especially high mp cameras, you run into diffraction problems, say, somewhere after f/8. One good solution is focus stacking. Take 3, to maybe 5 shots, focusing from very close (a few feet), mid distance, then infinity (usually) then focus stack in post. How can I do that in an HDR situation? Bracket 3 to 5 shots close, 3 to five shots mid distance, then 3 to 5 shots at infinity. That's a total of 9 to 15 images that have to be properly merged and focus stacked. No thank you. To me, getting it as close to right in camera so I can to minimize the time I spend in post is a goal. I'd rather be out taking pictures.

I like taking pictures of sunsets, especially when the sun is surrounded by clouds or a bit covered by clouds with the bottom of the sun right at or just dipping slightly below the horizon. I find I get a lot better results taking a spot reading of the sky away from the sun, then a spot reading of the landscape below the sky then using a GND filter equal to the difference as compared to bracketing and merging in post. The GND allows me to really bring out the color in clouds around the sun and to stop or significantly reduce the flare I could get from the sun as well as bring color to the sun instead of it being a big white dot. You can't get the same result by bracketing and blending in post without a lot of really hard tedious work including replacing the sun with a filled shape. I know, I've done it. Too much time and effort to get it looking natural.

I believe the long time professional landscape photographers who conducted the workshop I attended, and the ones who conducted the online courses, shared their best techniques with us. For the price, they better have. I think I'll stick with what they taught me and one of the very first things we went over was filter systems and how they all highly recommend rectangular filter systems with ND, and both hard and soft GND filters. It's what they use. I'm not trying to convince anyone to change what they are doing, just to bring a full range of ideas to those who just might be getting into a particular subject. Isn't that what these forums are for?

In a landscape workshop we talked a lot about stor... (show quote)

Thank you for your considered response. Let's explore the points. First, what is clear that to duplicate a GND in post, you only need two exposures, one normal and one corresponding to the strength of the filter. Since most cameras have a minimum bracket of three, the easiest thing is to do a 3 exposure bracket that gives you your normal exposure plus two darker. For instance, if I want four stops of underexposure for the equivalent of a 4 stop GND, I shoot a 3 exposure bracket starting at -2EV, giving me the equivalent of 0, -2 and -4. I do not have to set up the filter. I have only my camera and my lens and a tripod. The only extra work is doing two focus stacks instead of one. I put my two images as two layers in PS, add a layer mask. This takes about a minute. Now, using a brush, I simply paint in or paint out the transition that I want. Except in extreme circumstances where large objects bisect the transition line, this takes at most a couple of minutes. At this point, I can independently optimize the two layers using all the image controls that an image editor affords. After I achieve the effect I want, I can further go back and touch up the transition depending on the adjustments made. This is maybe ten minutes total or less, to achieve an image that I could only dream of using a GND. Ansel Adams never let the laborious darkroom work involved in optimizing his prints stop him from getting out in the field, but he also never let his wish to take pictures stop him from spending a significant amount of time in the darkroom turning his negatives into the best prints possible.

In your second scenario, all you need to do is to take a single exposure for your metered sky and one for your metered foreground. If you cannot achieve the sky exposure with camera controls (if it is too bright and you do not have a high enough shutter speed) then pop on a normal ND for that exposure. Arguably, if you have the sun in frame, you will get better results if you can manage the photo without a piece of plastic or glass to add to the flare and reflection of a point light source.

In either of these cases, the extra amount of work at the end is balanced by the fact that you actually have MORE time in the field, as you do not have to pack along your GNDs, unpack and select the right one, mount and adjust it. Two exposures in each situation and you are ready to do the next shot.

I think that the only real argument against my suggestion is that many photographers are not used to doing what Weston called "previsualization", which is being able to picture what the final result will be in the field. If you are used to using a GND and do not have the experience of combining exposures, you will not be able to understand what you will be able to achieve with blended exposures as opposed to GNDs, in which latter case what you see is what you get.

I imagine that for photographers who do not understand this, it is much harder to demonstrate in the field in a workshop than simply slapping on a GND to demonstrate what is necessary for achieving exposure balance in a situation in which some balance is necessary between sky and foreground. There is no question that, for absolutely the widest range of possibilities in these situations, GNDs cannot hold a candle to combined exposures. There is no question that GNDs work. I used them for years in video work, and for that they are still the go-to solution. But with digital stills, it is no contest.

kymarto Loc: Portland OR and Milan Italy

Quick example. I put this together in about 15 minutes from two exposures 4 EV apart. Not perfect because it wasn't on a tripod, so there is a slight misalignment on the right side, which I could correct but anyway you get the idea. I was able to easily build a near perfect transition between sky and foreground. Imagine this now with a GND. I increased the saturation of the sky beyond reason, just for fun. I'm not holding this up as the perfect example of what can be done, and I could still improve the transition with another 10 minutes work, but hopefully this will serve to illustrate what is possible with combined and masked exposures. At least no telltale straight transition...

Piraterich

Great your taking a class as far as filters they are interesting and fun to experiment with ( yes they had more importance in film days) I enjoy using mine as opposed to sitting in front of my computer. I have zomei ( similar to Cokin) no noticeable color cast very inexpensive compared to Lee or any of the other brands you’ll have a great time learning enjoy the part of photography from the archives