Are your flip-downs tinted as well as polarised? If they are, the tinting is going to be a significant contributor to the darkening that they cause. Depending on the amount of tinting, it may be causing more darkening than the polarisation.

I spent some time looking for polarised glasses for driving that weren't tinted, or at the very least lightly tinted, and they're not that easy to find - and not cheap when you do find them. Anglers use them because they reduce the reflections on water, and if they're not tinted or lightly tinted, the anglers can still see through the water to what's underneath.

I eventually settled for fairly cheap polarised driving glasses that are lightly tinted yellow (other tints can be hazardous when driving at night).

It's got a grainy film look. And the decor is a bit reminiscent....

That would be my assumption as well. I can't speak from experience as far as stars are concerned, but in other contexts, if the angle of view is wide* and if the focus point is far off, the DOF is fine for stuff beyond the focus point, even when you're using a wide aperture.

Perhaps somebody who has explored these possibilities with stars can comment. I suspect that the big no-no is to go beyond the infinity focus point, and providing you're avoiding that it should be OK to focus on far off stuff and have the really far off stuff come out sharp thanks to the DOF. In that context I'd expect auto focus (followed by focus lock) to be fine (as a previous poster has stated).

* For anybody that's interested in star photography, the ideal lens is one with a very wide angle of view and a very wide maximum aperture.

I am familiar with several members in this forum that are self-confessed sharpness freaks (that's exactly the expression they'd use). The term wasn't used in a derogatory or insulting way.

Pushing the focus adjustment to its maximum is going beyond infinity, which is noticeably not the optimum setting. You don't have to be a sharpness freak to want the benefits of optimum focus, especially with subjects like stars which are focus-critical.

Having said that, I'm very fond of using a small aperture and then getting the focus point in roughly the right ball park to get the DOF covering what I want it to cover most (for landscapes mostly).

In the case of stars, you want the aperture to be as wide as possible to avoid using a high ISO or too long a shutter speed (about 30 sec is considered the maximum if you want to avoid pronounced star trails. 20 sec or less is regarded as being more desirable).

Any differences are down to how the colours are rendered. Adobe (originators of DNG) seem to prefer a neutral rendering, which I would say is exactly right (it's probably why I hardly use the Nik or Topaz plug-ins that I have at my disposal - I don't like what they do to the colouring).

I haven't seen the film, but I think you would need to consider the era that was being depicted when the camera appeared. If it was anything more than a couple of decades ago, it would be a film camera. The Nikon F series were compact but had a purposeful look to them.

And others. That's where you enter into the murky world of proprietary formats. That's where each proprietary format requires format-specific software to open the file. Even within a single company there can be more than one raw format.

And the advantages? None that I can think of. Raw data is raw data, and none of these proprietary formats are doing anything any better than DNG. Some are more compact than others, but that's an area where DNG has a distinct advantage.

Not to mention Fuji and Hasselblad. It's not often you see flexibility being touted as a negative. Flexibility can be misused, but so can lots of useful things.

Blaming your Operating System??! I've seen better excuses than that :roll: :lol: .

You make that sound like a bad thing. That level of flexibility is bound to be useful for some people in some circumstances.

Most of the time DNG are sourced from raw files, and apparently the conversion process is genuinely lossless. Since that's the usual scenario, it would be unusual to have a degraded image converted to DNG, and even more unusual to have such a DNG without knowing that it's sourced from a degraded image. And in that situation, what would have been the alternative?

You can invent all sorts of unfavourable scenarios for any format - a low capacity hard drive or memory stick that fills up too quickly if you store TIFF files for example.

If that's the case it might be worth mentioning that DNG is classified as a type of raw file.

People who photograph stars will tell you that you can't go by the infinity setting on the lens - you have to do it manually, and it's always slightly different from the infinity setting.

For the picture as a whole, lift the shadows a bit and lower the highlights/whites a bit, then add some contrast to compensate. If the sky isn't to your liking after that you could select it and lift the shadows and maybe desaturate or de-contrast a little.

Alternatively if you have an HSL tool you could lighten and desaturate blue a little. And you can use yellow (and to a lesser extent orange) to darken the sand/rocks. You could also try tint-shifting yellow towards orange a bit and orange towards yellow a little. If the slight purple cast is bothering you you could tint-shift purple (not magenta) all the way to the blue end (it's only the sky and water that are noticeably purple), and perhaps shift the Tint slider slightly towards green.

A good place for inspiration :-) .