Overpowering the Sun with a Global Shutter

Sony A9 III 1/80,000th of a second, outdoors on a bright day with wireless flash.

Behind the Scenes shot of the above.  Who needs a studio anymore?

Also In This Issue:

• Brief comparison between Adobe, DxO, and Topaz Noise Reduction tools
• Books in the Pipeline
• Seminars and Photo Safari!  
• More Travel Photos

But first, some announcements. 

Announcements

The book on the OM System OM-1 II by Tony Phillips is out in all formats!   

In the Pipeline: Two books are just weeks away from being released!  The Fujifilm X100VI camera by Tony Phillips.  And the Sony A9 III camera by me :-)   You can currently pre-order both books at a discount.

Seminars!

The first seminar since the pandemic is taking place next month here in Plymouth, Massachusetts!  The hotel still has room if you want to fly in.  April 27-28th; learn more and sign up here.

But wait!  Two more seminars are happening in September.  Florence, Alabama (about an hour from Huntsville, about 2 hours from Nashville) is happening September 14-15, 2024.  And Kansas City, Kansas on September 21-22, 2024.  Come join the fun, learn how to make people say, "Wow!" to your images, and get the most out of the gear you already own!

Photo club members: Have your club president contact me for a mutually beneficial offer! 

Photo Safari

There are two rooms left for this made-just-for-photographers event, taking place in Kenya in November 2024.  Learn more about this wonderful opportunity, and you can spend some quality time talking shop with me. :-)  https://FriedmanArchives.com/safari

Overpowering the Sun at 1/80,000th of a Second

I’ve been a BIG fan of wireless flash since the 1990’s, ever since Minolta invented it.  (See my wireless flash gallery on the Friedman Archives website.) So when Sony introduced the Alpha 9 III with it’s earth-shattering global shutter, I got excited about the prospect of the elimination of the flash sync speed, combined with the top shutter speed of (wait for it) 1/80,000th of a second which really captured my imagination.  I dreamt of being able to shoot outdoor portraits on a bright day, wide open using flash without needing a neutral density filter to bring the shutter speed down to under 1/250th, as is required of conventional cameras with focal plane shutters.  I further fantasized about being able to control my ambient light to the point of making it look completely black, with only the light from the flash illuminating my subject, regardless of how bright it was outside.

So was I able to do it?  I've made two YouTube videos on this topic, the first of which demonstrates the capability:

And the second shows how to configure the flashes and the camera to shoot this way (easier to demonstrate than to spell it out in the book - I should know, I've done both):

Are you impressed, or what?

Adobe vs. Topaz Noise Reduction

After I published last month's blog (while still in Norway) showing the impressive noise reduction and image enhancement capabilities of the latest version of Photoshop, a longtime reader said: "There are much better noise reduction apps (i.e., DxO, Topaz Photo AI) than what Adobe provides now - and a lot faster than 15 minutes to process an image (probably less than 30 seconds) (*).  Horrible light, high ISO - these tools can work wonders."  Thinking this would make a great blog post, I sent him the original raw file and asked him to do his best using his favorite tools.

A few days later he wrote back: "Here is the Eagle image processed in DxO PL7 and Topaz Photo AI.  I sent you both DNG and (95%) Jpegs. PL7 is a full-blown image editor but includes the Deep Prime noise reduction feature.  (DxO also has a “Noise Reduction Only” app which doesn’t have any of the editing features that is less expensive.)  If you are using Topaz or don’t want the editing features of PL7, the standard procedure is to pre-process the images and then output the DNG files for input to your editor of choice.  (There are apparently a lot of LightRoom users who use DxO in that way.). I also cropped the image to eliminate the uneven top of the image.  Both these apps run entirely on the Mac/PC - no internet processing - and only take a few seconds to process this image.  Both apps are available for both Mac and Windows systems.

Topaz Photos AI is basically only doing noise reduction (emphasizing the “subject” (i.e., the eagle) and also sharpens the eagle.  The one obvious issue here is that it gets the jpeg wrong - under-saturated.  (Topaz lets you submit images to them to use in building their AI models, but this is your image and I didn’t do that.  I generally don’t send my own images either but strangely, their noise reduction seems to be getting worse with each update - and I get an update every couple of days.)  The key features of Topaz Photo AI that I like is that I get a full-screen preview of the noise reduction and sharpening and they have models for jpeg and tiff images too.  DxO Deep Prime only works on raw images.)

For DxO PL7, I let the software apply the default set of adjustments, as follows.   Deep Prime XD (the newest model), DxO Smart Lighting (it is supposed to improve the image dynamic range - I generally like the results), Selective Tone, DxO Clear View Plus (contrast, micro contrast), Lens softness correction (DxO has camera/lens specific modules and I had to download new modules for your camera), and Chromatic Aberration corrections.  I think the DxO Deep Prime results are clearly superior to what Topaz produces.  And I didn’t have to fiddle with the file at all to get these results (only cropping the image).  My one irritation with DxO is that it only shows a small preview of the noise reduction results - you have to process and look at the output to really understand what happened."

Okay, that's a lot of embellishment.  How did these tools compare to what I shared last month?

First, the original image for comparison (click on any image to view larger and sharper).  Jpgs of the below processed shots (including the original .arw file so you can play with it yourself) can be downloaded and examined here.  

Original .jpg out of the camera

And here's what I was able to do with Adobe's new AI-based noise reduction:

This is a re-processed version of what I showed last month.  I learned that if you're going to use this tool it's best to use it first before any other adjustments are made, even in Lightroom where the order of operations is theoretically unimportant 

Below is what my friend came up with:

DxO

100% crop

Topaz De-Noise & Sharpen

100% crop

100% crop of Adobe (what I did)

I know which one I like best.  What do you think?

(Note: I'm just comparing the noise reduction capabilities here.  Didn't have the time to do the curves and other adjustments for a true apples-to-apples comparison.)

*** UPDATE *** 

Just a few hours after this blog post came out I got an email from Larry Powell, who downloaded my original RAW file and did his own take on it using Topaz tools.  I have included his image in the .zip file linked to above, and a 100% crop of it appears below:

Topaz 100% crop from Larry Powell

These tools continue to improve daily.  And as I've always said, if you have to pixel peep in order to see a difference, then the difference is not meaningful.  We live in the future. :-)

More Travel Photos

And speaking of Norway, I thought I'd share some additional travel photos taken since the last blog post.  

Panorama of the Front of the Ship

Downtown Bergen Daytime

Philosophically I don't believe in candid or street photography; even though I recognize its legitimacy.  I just think it's rude.  Today I walked by a storefront in the morning (before the shops were opened) and I saw a man dressed like Robert Oppenheimer at a table reading the paper.  I was tempted but ultimately didn't take the shot.  That bugged me for the next hour (the shots that get away always do).  

So I returned to the store once it had opened and once the customers left I struck up a conversation with the shopkeeper of the smoke shop.  I complimented him that he really looked the part.  He explained that he's just an employee, and all employees either had to dress like this or wear a uniform.  I asked if I could take an environmental portrait; he hesitated but eventually agreed.  He even got his hat although he objected that they weren't usually worn indoors.  We talked about travel.  He always wanted to go to Boston but never had the time.  I told him he's still young.

I can't remember a time I got exactly the portrait I wanted in only three shots.  But I did.  And I emailed the image to him immediately.

Instead of being a rude American by shooting a candid, today I made a friend.

Bergen early in the morning.

Beregen through a rainy window.

Fjords.  (And I refuse to make a joke about Cjevys.)

Being tourists amongst the fjords

Being tourists amongst the fjords after removing the other tourists who didn't move for 15 minutes by using Photoshop's object selection / Generative Fill feature using the words, "Remove background".  Although it's not perfect, it's 1000x better than the original. :-)

Bergens Tidende is Norway's fifth-largest newspaper, and the country's largest newspaper outside Oslo.

Alexei Navalny memorial

Until next time...

Yours Truly, Gary Friedman

(*) To be fair, the 15 minutes I quoted to process the image in last month's blog had to do with the Guinnenss-book-of-world-records-slowest-internet-available-on-the-ship connection I had.  Adobe uploads images to their cloud processors in order to do a better job with some of the new tools.

This blog post was written by a human.  No generative AI was used in its creation (if you don't count the noise reduction in the eagle examples).