DPP: Exercise 10: White Balance

The purpose of this exercise is to examine the effects of the camera's white balance settings under several lighting conditions.  The first set was shot in ares pictured above, the afternoon sun off to the right, the camera pointed at the area in direct sunlight in the red circle.  The arrow points to a shaded spot just out of frame where a second series was taken.

DPP: Exercise 9: Scene Dynamic Range

This exercise is a continuation of the last, but requiring five scenes in a variety of settings and ranges.  Here is the first.  I will add more as the week progresses.   The image was captured in P mode with matrix metering and wide-area auto-focus.  The camera was then set to spot metering and single focus, and meter readings taken at each of the spots indicated with an exposure setting.  The image shows a middling dynamic range, with 3.3 stops between the darkest and lightest elements.

DPP: Exercise 8: Your Camera's Dynamic Range

The previous two exercises looked into perhaps the biggest issues in digital capture:  highlight clipping and noise.  These correspond to the camera's extremes of the tonal palette, the light and the dark, and it is this range that is examined here.

The brief calls for shooting a scene with a range of contrast in bright daylight .  It also calls for a white card, but this was omitted since the scene had a couple of reasonable sized white patches (the bar on the No Entry sign and the painted curb).

The scene was shot in AP, multi-metering mode, with no noise reduction.  Extreme brightness required using exposure compensation to dial down 1EV.   Playback showed some clipping on the white curb, but as the previous exercise indicated the camera overcompensated in its display of highlight clipping, I thought this exposure would be adequate and not show any clipping once imported into LR.

DPP: Exercise 7: Tolerance for Noise

The brief for this exercise calls for a series of captures at the camera's full range of ISO settings with the intention of demonstrating noise.  Noise may be the result of insufficient photons striking the sensor and may occur when shooting under low light, with long shutter speeds, or high ISO settings.  The result is the speckling effect seen in the right image in the pair above, showing captures at 80 (l) and 6400 (r) ISO.

DPP: Exercise 6: Highlight Clipping

The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate the process of highlight clipping.  This happens when at least part of an image is overexposed to such an extent that visual details are lost in what appears to be a bright light, or bright spot.  It may also be said of such an image that it is "blown out," that is detail is blown away by bright light.

The brief calls for finding the exposure settings at which highlight clipping first appears in a contrasty scene (some light and dark elements), then shooting one image one-step higher, followed by three images each one step lower than the preceding.

Simple as it seems, I am having some difficulty.  What my Sony RX100 and Lightroom tell me are not the same.

This is a rather poor capture from my iPad, but it serves the purpose as it shows the camera reading a large area of highlight clipping on the left near a window.  This flashes black in camera.  Note that the histograms show minimal clipping in blue.  Also note that this is not a live view available while shooting, but viewable only after capture.

DPP: Exercise 5: Linear Capture

The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate the interpretive ability of the camera’s software by looking at what the sensor captures and comparing it to what software renders.

To do this we are asked to take any JPEG or TIFF and first convert it to 16 bits per channel using Photoshop.  I did a bit of googling to find out how to do this in Lightroom before posting to the OCA Photography forum for clarification.  It turns out LR processes in 16 bit and exports JPEG at 8-bit.  JPEG bit depth cannot be adjusted (so far as I can tell), but TIFF can be set at 8 or 16.  So for the purpose of this exercise I exported a 16-bit TIFF.  This is the image, a souvenir collection from a student who went to Mecca for Hajj.