D700 Specular Highlight Handling

[Chris Nuzzaco]

I just bought a brand spanking new D700 for my commercial photography work. I thought some of you guys here would appreciate this. I shot this at 12 bit raw compressed, this is a 100% crop, 0 sharpening, 0 noise reduction, linear gamma curve. I used a Nikon 50mm 1.4 lens, ISO 200. Am I missing any tech specs? :P

[Dan Hudgins]

What's odd is that I cannot see the tread in the car's tires? Maybe it's the JPG blocking up the dark details? Can you post a larger crop 1:1 of the car's tires?

If that was shot on film you could pull process and increase esposure and do some other things to maybe see the disk of the sun in the reflection and the tread in the tires maybe, but at this point who cares, filmmaking is not fine art photography its about selling pop-corn.

I went round and round with my Brother several years ago taking photos like that, he wanted shadow detail under the cars, and to see the detail in the reflections on the crome car bumpers.

When I finally got that by double re-processing he said the result was too flat, which is what I told him before we started. You could put an S curve on it, but unless you dither, like film grain, a single binary step is too little to see the small gains in highlight and shadow detail at the ends of the range.

With compressed formats, the fine noise that holds the extreme highlight and shadow detail is filtered out anyway, so going for DCI compressed release formats will maybe loose whatever you try to hold anyway?

What is notable is that the D700 did not seem to solarize or make streaks.

We did some filmout tests using H.264 files, but the grading range is very limited, it is not good for a recording format. RAW is best for Digital Cinema use which has harder demands than still photography since in still shooting you can use auto-bracket, but in movie use you need to recover as much as you can in post to make up for errors in exposure and lighting (and in many cases the performance can never be re-captured).

[Chris Nuzzaco]

I'll post some more versions. As for tire tread details, I think it has more to do with the focus not being placed there (I believe I had the focus point on the mail box), and honestly, those tires are probably way to small to resolve given my distance from them. I'll post the full picture, you'll see what I mean.

What I really loved was the lack of streaking. My old camera would have produced a great big white hot streak.

[Chris Nuzzaco]

Here is a downsized copy of the whole frame. Again, all the zero tampering with sharpening still applies to this one.

[ericyoung]

...What I really loved was the lack of streaking. My old camera would have produced a great big white hot streak.

D700 is a CMOS sensor which if I remember correctly aren't susceptible to vertical streaking on overexposed highlights?

Was your older camera a non-D series Nikon - think those had CCD sensors which will all streak at some level of highlight overexposure, although the better CCD designs are pretty resistant.

[Chris Nuzzaco]

My old camera was actually a D70 (CCD). The noise floor sucked, the D700 on the other hand is practically a night vision camera if you really push its ISO. I'm still testing it out, especially the various flavors of RAW it offers.

[Chris Nuzzaco]

D700 is a CMOS sensor which if I remember correctly aren't susceptible to vertical streaking on overexposed highlights?


Correct. Here's a great write up at DVX: http://dvxuser.com/jason/CMOS-CCD/

Given what I do, the D700 was a perfect choice. I shoot a lot of natural light outdoors in the woods. Lots of baklight, hard to capture range of tones, specular highlights etc... A low noise floor and lack of streaking was just what I needed. As for the rolling shutter thing, that seems to be more a problem for high speed flash based photography, but the Nikon lighting system actually addresses the issue, so it's sorta irrelevant. I'm not sure how much the skew will show up in fast camera pans yet.

[Daniel Browning]

...linear gamma curve.

Be careful! Graeme is on the Royal Canadian Mounted Gamma Police force now! And Deanan is on SWAT. :) Proper terminology and all that.


What's odd is that I cannot see the tread in the car's tires?

Most raw converters don't allow the photographer to chose the black level, I think it was set above zero in this photograph. The D700 clips black in the raw file slightly above the mean read noise level, but that's not what we're seeing here.

[Chris Nuzzaco]

Be careful! Graeme is on the Royal Canadian Mounted Gamma Police force now! And Deanan is on SWAT. :) Proper terminology and all that.

LOL, I know what you mean, by linear, I'm speaking in terms of the curve used in the raw converter itself, after another curve was clearly applied to the image to correct it for my monitor... confusing I know! I actually shoot with an extremely RAW modified DVX100. True linear on a typical 2.2 gamma monitor would look really dark.