Scott G Trenorden

A couple of months ago, when sorting RAW files on my hard-drives, I noticed some old photos of the Western Australian Wheatbelt taken with my first dSLR, a Canon 400D.
As my Lightroom and Photoshop processes and skill level had changed dramatically since I first process those Wheatbelt files, I excitedly imported them into LR2 to play with them.

Very rapidly did I come to a sad realisation. The 400D files contain nowhere near as much ‘depth’ as the RAW files from my current camera, a Nikon D700, and thus the heavy graduating filters etc that I would usually apply just rapidly turned the Wheatbelt photos to junk.

Meaning, I was unable to do anywhere near the amount of processing on the 400D files as I would with my current shots – such as my Cambodia photos for example.
[Note: I will simply leave it as ‘depth’ as I don’t wish to talk about the science of RAW files here.. If ever…]

For my Cambodia and Laos trip I lugged around my D700 and 24-70 f2.8 lens, backup lens, laptop and LX3. It was very rewarding, I think, in regards to the resulting images (see the Travel & Landscape gallery from my website if interested: http://www.scottgtrenorden.com.au/galleries-doco.html) but the inconvenience of such a large kit was repeatedly constrictive.
When I visited Thailand soon after I took my OM4 Ti film camera, twenty rolls of film and my LX3 and it was immensely better in terms of portability.

And thus upon hearing about the upcoming Panasonic GF1 I excitedly ordered one for a few reasons:
Apparently near SLR quality images.
Small package with big results.
The ability to combine the manual lenses from my OM4 Ti with the GF1.
Sexy Lumix imagery that I fell in love with on the LX3 (BnW Dynamic? Oh yes!).

And now that GF1 has arrived.

But since ordering the camera, that inability to achieve the look I wanted with the 400D, that I am now used to using with the D700, sat in the back of my head.
“Would the GF1’s RAW files be as equally limiting as the 400D files are?” Would I be able to use this camera as I hoped; could I use the GF1 and OM4 as a much, much smaller and more portable travel kit and still get high quality resulting images?

[Note#2: I don’t mean for this post to be a slam on the Canon 400D in any way. It’s a very good little camera. It’s a simple case of realistic technological limitations.]

“There must be other people,” I thought “that are pondering this same question”. And so I decided I’d do a Before & After blog post with image examples.
I’ve read several reviews on the physicality of the camera – and seen many, many more – but not so many on the usability of the RAW files themselves.
What are the limitations of the RAW files?
How much depth of processing can you apply to them?
Do skies get severe banding quickly or can you apply nice smooth, deep gradients (this was a big one)?
How good is the colour detail and faithfulness?

I thought I’d take some very basic photos in not-so-good conditions (middle of the day for example) and do what I could to make them usable and then post the before and after photos. My reasoning being that if these photos looked good then travel shots of a beautiful vista at 7am would have to look ten times better again, right?!

For this test I used four lenses; the Panasonic 20mm f1.7, Olympus 14-42mm, OM Zuiko 35mm f2.8 and OM Zuiko 50mm f1.4 (the OM lenses are manual focus via adapter).

Keep in mind, too, that I have only had this camera for a couple of days so I didn’t play around with White balance and picture modes too much and thus the ‘before’ shots will look very ordinary. As the RAWs are converted to default settings on import I didn’t worry about these factors for this initial test.
I only spent 10 minutes max on each image.

Also, to clarify, this is not necessarily how I would post produce the images for final products! Instead, I have pushed the post production - much darker gradients than I’d use etc, especially in the last image - in order to find the GF1’s RAW’s limitations.

Panasonic 20mm f1.7:

I shot this in Dynamic BnW (in RAW+Jpeg mode) and so am linking the imported RAW file, not the Jpeg.
before

after

Olympus 14-42mm:
Nature film mode. Jpeg and then processed RAW file.

before

after

OM Zuiko 35mm f2.8:
I shot this using a yellow-green filter and Nostalgic film mode to go for a ‘70s tone. I think I forgot to turn off auto white balance, however, thus the predominantly blue tone… I do like the end result though.

before

after

OM Zuiko 50mm f1.4:

Nature film mode, yellow-green filter again – I wanted a lot of greeny blue in the sky. This shot isn’t meant to be a compositional masterpiece, obviously; I shot it in order to establish how much I could gradient the sky.

There is definitely a lot of room to deepen skies with graduated filters in Lightroom 2+, as should be evident from this comparison. The ‘after’ shot here is just part the point where banding started to show up very clearly. Jpeg compression certainly doesn’t help either.

before

after

All in all, I have to say I am very impressed with the GF1 from a post production point of view.
The biggest issue I have seen is noise levels (even above 400 ISO when viewed at 50% or 100%) but that is countered very easily with Noise Ninja or similar.

The camera definitely isn’t a D700, obviously, but the quality and usability of its images are even better than I had expected to be honest. There is a lot of room for artistic licence within an image.

Most important of all for me personally; I will be very confident in taking this camera travelling for travel photo and Photojournalistic purposes.

Thank you for reading. Please let me know via Comment or email if there are any other tests you’d like performed!

Scott.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 2:04 pm and is filed under GF1, Tech Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.