Local toning algorithms are becoming very popular among photographers. We all grown to love Lightroom’s clarity tool, which basically preforms local contrast operations on the image. A new paper suggests using Edge-Preserving Decompositions for Multi-Scale Tone and Detail Manipulation, which may bring new possibilities for image processing operations such as clarity, USM, DRC and even HDR. I really liked the tone manipulation method results as shown on the researches web site. I think it will allow me to get very interesting photographic results. Maybe some of this will be implemented in a photographic tool someday so we can enjoy it. Click here for Edge-Preserving Decompositions for Multi-Scale Tone and Detail Manipulation.

A few weeks ago a kammagamma reader asked me if it is possible to set Adobe Lightroom to mimic his Leica M8 colors with Nikon D3 RAW files. For those of you who don’t own a Leica M8 rangefinder, Leica M8 captures DNG files with gamma and color settings that were designed by Leica. So when opening Leica M8 DNG files in Lightroom or ACR, a “Leica” color look is being applied to the images. Long story short, it’s rather simple to mimic those setting with lightroom for Nikon cameras and I think most of you might find this preset interesting.

I’ve tested this preset with some Canon cameras and it was quite close (although in theory it should be the same), but there is more accuracy with Nikon D3/D300 cameras. If there is going to be demand for this preset I’ll try to produce a more accurate Canon version. Please do let me know how this preset works for you.

m8-on-nikonlrtemplate.zip
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We have a new top story today! We wanted to test how much of an improvement is the new Nikon D300 over the Nikon D200. We tested the Nikon D300 for true sensor RAW Dynamic Range, SNR and noise reduction on JPEG files. All in our new top story.

We are back from a slight break with a new article! This one is about Canon DPP and High ISO images. As you know, we are quite pleased with Canon’s JPEG noise reduction performance. Sadly though, the same excellent level of noise reduction is not what you’ll find with DPP. There are some tricks you can do to produce better results, but it is really up to Canon to address these issues. Click here for “High ISO with DPP should and can be better”.

I had to get me one of those iPhones. It really is that good as they say. During some sneaking inside the iPhone I have discovered the ICC profile for the screen the iPhone is using. It is really amazing that the iPhone actually uses an ICC profile, but even more amazing is that its screen is quite good. Its gamut range is very close or in even better in some cases than the old non LED LCD screen of my MacBook Pro. Not bad at all, you can find some comparisons here.
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