Cool. It's nice to know people find it useful, though it still seems a little redundant insofar as one could just shoot in program mode and set the ISO manually anyway. Not that that is a bad thing. Redundancy in the form of providing multiple ways of doing this can be good as long as it isn't overdone to the extent that it becomes confusing.

As a computing enthusiast I've long been a subscriber to PC Pro magazine. Then I saw the following review (which I must have passed over in the actual issue where it was printed) and in all honesty it's got me thinking about cancelling my subscription:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/digital-cameras/362497/pentax-k-x

The comment which got my hackles up was, of course, this, in the last paragraph: "There’s also less scope for moving upwards in Pentax’s range – the K-5 simply isn’t as good as the Canon or Nikon equivalents."

What the ****? To make a comment like that with no attempt to explain what they mean by it or substantiate it whatsoever (they haven't even reviewed the k-5) is just rock bottom journalism. It surprises me coming from a publication which is generally reasonably even-handed and a reliable source of information in its editorial content (for a PC magazine, anyway).

My wife pointed out they might mean that it isn't as good as Canon or Nikons top of the range (i.e. full frame) DSLRs, but if so they need to point that out, and mention the fact that the cameras they're comparing it with are considerably more expensive, not to mention much larger and heavier. OTOH if they are comparing it to the Canons and Nikons in it's actual price range, their opinion flies in the face of what's been said in practically every photography site and magazine.

It also strikes me that this is a popular magazine, and such a comment could well influence readers, putting them off buying into the Pentax system for no good reason (or at least no good reason they bothered to actually tell us about).

Not at all. I was really just using this shot as a tester and I'm not desperate to keep it. The problem is really that I have a few other shots that really captured some brilliant moments, but which have similar exposure problems. I'm a lot more reluctant to bin those, for obvious reasons. They deserve my best attempts to restore them to some semblance of usability to preserve those moments, especially as it was myself who screwed up by not thinking out the exposures properly in the first place. Unfortunately it came down to a combination of my inexperience with these kind of lighting conditions and just not really thinking about it as I should have done beforehand.

Hi, Thanks for all the comments and the other attempts to show what could be done. They're not really what I was going for but it helps to see what's possible. As I said in my original post I did indeed start by working on the RAW file so I'm not sure everybody read it but thanks for the tips anyway. What I didn't do was dial down the exposure when I was working with the RAW so I'll try that. I really like CoDa's one and would definitely try something similar in a different situation.

I tried quite a few without the flash. Some of those with people basically standing still came out quite well. Those with people dancing, on the other hand, were almost all blurred, even with the ISO ramped up really high. Now if it were the kind of dancing where people didn't move their heads much, it wouldn't be too bad. You could get away with a bit of motion blur in the limbs giving a sense of movement and all that. However as mentioned this was rock and metal... rockers/metalheads just don't do non-head-moving type dancing.

If I do something similar in future I'll be tempted just to underexpose everything and rescue the exposures in PP. Allows using faster shutter speeds and is much easier than rescuing overexposures. Particularly with 14-bit RAW. However, I didn't really think it out too well beforehand and I can't go back and take the photos again.

The intended audience will be primarily (I'd imagine almost exclusively) people who were there on the night. Plus it will be in the context of quite a few group shots in which the red lighting is clearly visible, i.e you can actually see some of the lights. In those particular shots the bright white flash light just looks plain wrong.

Just to clarify, I'm really just learning about post processing and up till now have generally kept it to a really minimal level. Hence the fact I'm looking for some constructive criticism / any hints or tips I can get.

Last night I attended a reunion night for the Rock/Metal club I used to go to in my late teens / early 20s. The actual club closed its doors nearly 15 years ago now (makes me feel old!) so the reunion night was held in a nearby venue. I took a bunch of photos and have been asked for the best ones to go on a website for the event.

During the night with the ambient light being 'disco lighting' the lighting was predominantly red, with some blue and purple thrown in. I wanted to keep the appropriate (red) colour cast to the photos to give them a sense of the atmosphere on the night, but the ambient light was not bright enough to take sharp pictures, and the flash tended to wash out the colour of the light, not to mention producing quite a few overexposed faces.

Below is my attempt to compensate. Not the best picture of the night but a suitable example to work with as it had the flaws mentioned above plus a general lack of sharpness.

I first used RPP to create a custom white balance restoring the red light cast from the venue (and get rid of a rather unpleasant greenish cast - not quite sure where that came from as there were no green lights as far as I recall). Also used some sharpening, highlight restoration and so forth.

Then I imported into GIMP, cropped, resized and used the smudge tool plus a little dodge/burn to even out the skin tones a bit in an attempt to make the face look less overexposed (the highlight restoration in RPP had some effect but only went so far.) Anyway, below you can see the three stages. Any comments on how I could improve it further would be most welcome.


Original Camera JPEG, (Resized, Original was shot in RAW+ so this is the camera JPEG, not a JPEG version of the RAW file)...

[IMG]http://i1204.photobucket.com/albums/bb411/msitaylor/Processing%20Stages/IMGP1816ocj.jpg[/IMG]



JPEG version of RAW file after processing in RPP (Resized)...

[IMG]http://i1204.photobucket.com/albums/bb411/msitaylor/Processing%20Stages/IMGP1816RPP.jpg[/IMG]


'Final' JPEG after further processing in GIMP...

[IMG]http://i1204.photobucket.com/albums/bb411/msitaylor/Processing%20Stages/IMGP1816.jpg[/IMG]

Couldn't get Darktable to install. UFRaw doesn't seem to like the K-5 raw files. Have downloaded RPP (Raw Photo Processor) which seems to work fine.

Well, as we are meeting in the car park, one possible solution is for people just to head for my car. It's quite distinctive and generally sticks out like a sore thumb, even in a crowded car park. It's actually even brighter yellow than it looks like in the snapshot.

Apologies for the quality of the photograph, it was taken with a cheap mobile phone camera because I had just got the car and my mother wanted me to send her a picture message of it! I'd take one with my K-5, but the car's rather dirty right now.

[IMG]http://i1204.photobucket.com/albums/bb411/msitaylor/YellowIgnis.jpg[/IMG]

I have Linux on my laptop but not on the iMac. I had a look around and see Darktable is available on MacOS via MacPorts, so I'll try that. Had some problems with MacPorts in the past though (applications failing to install), so I'm not counting any chickens.