I don't work actively to promote my skills as a photographer, but I would like to remain active and excited about taking pictures. Lately, I have been unable to come up with things to take pictures of. I recently went to the local aquarium thinking that would be exciting, however, all my photos turned out crappy. Poor lighting/ack of lighting plus those critters don't sit still for the shot-made for a waste of time and money. What can you guys suggest i.e. places to go, things to shoot, etc. that could get me really excited about taking pictures. Seems I am lacking in the area of focusing. I recently took some Halloween photos, which I thought the focus was spot on, only to have soft pictures.
Any suggestions on my request for help would be appreciated. Thanks

I have two favourite editing apps - Affinity1 and PhotoFiltre11. I often rely on my cameras to produce high quality SOOCs with menu adjustments, but might also use those editors. Using Serif products (Affinity1 and previously PhotoPlus7) and the fact that Panasonic and Leica removed low pass filters, my on-screen pics can be spoilt with jagger. The same pics do not show jagger when viewed using PhotoFiltre.
For those who do not know of PhotoFiltre, I would thoroughly recommend that they take time out to try the 30 day free download of PhotoFiltre11. The cost to then register is a fraction of the cost of Photoshop.

The new Point Color feature is absolutely incredible. If you (as I do) use the many color processing features of Lightroom in your post-processing, the Point Color feature is a game-changer. The granularity and precision it affords in color management is extraordinary.

A bit of a learning curve (but not as much as the new UI makes it seem), but well worth the effort. A good starting point is this YouTube video by Julieanne Kost (Everything You Need to Know About Point Color in Lightroom Classic): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzdg2ZXaKGo. Of course there are already many other videos on this feature, and many more to come no doubt.

So, these are some new files. If we assume some form of human error, rather than technology, that would mean you could take 5 new RAW images with the D850, run the DNG converter and successfully import. I'd try that to see if that helps figure out where / what to investigate further.

Other tests for technical problems:

Create a new and empty LRCAT to test if these problem images can be imported there.

Review the Camera RAW Cache settings, if available in v4, and see if this work folder is set large enough, say at least 20GB. Again, if the LR4 software has this tool, <Purge> the current contents and see if the import runs.

For the larger main LRCAT, run the back-up and compress function (this occurs during the 'backup'). See it that helps, especially if you can import into a temp LRCAT.

Yes, but the explanation is IS NOT simple.

CHG_CANON is correct when he says that there is no direct correlation between file size and image size, with the caveat of saving files using compression, lossy or lossless. JPEG is a lossy compression file format.

Now a bit of a technical discussion

The very basic process for saving a JPEG is:

1) Original image is broken into image blocks (8x8 blocks)

2) Via the Discrete Cosine Transform, transform the image from the spacial domain to the frequency domain and quantize the DCT coefficients. The level of quantization determines the amount of compression.

3) Strip the high frequency content (luminance and hue) from the image. The content removed is, generally, not noticeable by most viewers.

4) data compression (Huffman encoding)


So the image loses information and is highly compressed in the frequency domain resulting in much smaller files for a given image size. Both, the frequency content and the amount of compression (user selectable) determines the file size (not image size). For example, if you were to save a pure white image with the same image dimensions and same compression factor as your flower image was stored as, the white image would be smaller because there is no high frequency content in it.

When the image is viewed, the software decodes the remaining info in the jpeg file and displays the lossy image. In most cases, the information lost is not perceptible to the viewer.

So, why work in the frequency domain? Representing an image in the frequency domain requires MUCH less data than in the spacial domain. If you have a technical background, you’ll know that time series such as a sine wave can be described with much less data in the frequency domain (via the FFT) than in the time domain. JPEG’s use this same advantage.

This is why JPEG file size and image size DO NOT correlate!

Now back to the practical discussion.

There is 110MB of image data compressed into your 1.6MB JPEG file.

When you load your JPEG into Photoshop, Photoshop decodes the compressed image and stores it internally as 24-bit pixels, uncompressed (8 bits of R, 8 bits of G and 8 bits of B). In your case, your 1.6MB file is expanded to an uncompressed 110MB file internally. That allows PS to manipulate each individual pixel in the image. So here is a basic calculation on what the image size in bytes should be.

(7379 x 5021pxl) x (24 bits/pxl) / (8 bits/byte) = 111MB

Which corresponds to PS’s doc size.

AND, if you save your file as an uncompressed TIFF file, the resulting file size is 111 MB.

If you convert your image bit depth from 8-bit to 16-bit, the resulting TIFF is 222MB.

Hope this helps,
Mike

PS: Feel free to PM me if you have any specific questions about my response.

This is directed to dinosaurs that survived. I noticed the sale of lots of film at my local store the other day, and it reminded me of an experience I never questioned. I was in Australia for 7 months in 2000, and had a Contax G2 camera (35 mm rangefinder - still my all-time favorite traveling camera). I sought film from a local shop in my university and was offered several rolls of Ektachrome, which had ISO of 100 (if I remember correctly) and I was told that it was great in the red range (not my experience in USA-bought Ekatchrome). And it was! I was also told that this film was not available in the USA. Anyone have insights on this? I attach a few pix I took with the slide film (scanned by Kodak USA in 2001). Wish Kodachrome still existed! Cheers, mates.