My experience...

Yes, I found the "Adobe Standard" profiles to be a bit wrong! On the K5 the images are somewhat flat and require contrast adjustments and general fiddling.

In the end I decided to plump for the QPcard203, and am shocked at the difference! Colours are now much more accurate and pleasing and there's a lot less fiddling required (i.e. lower clarity required, lower vibrance) for a good image.

Currently I have only produced profiles for K5 and Q under cloudy conditions. So far, these work well in most lighting conditions (because it's the calibration and not the white balance - which must be separately performed using the regular tools). Using my cloudy profile under tungsten, fluorescent, daylight-ish seems to give excellent results. Lilacs, purples and blues are much more realistic too.

I did wonder about making these profile available for a small charge to cover faff-factors... but I'll need to add daylight (if I ever get any!) and other conditions. Will probably also profile for the Tokina 80-200/2.8 as the colour rendition is slightly different to the DA*16-50 that I profiled the first set by.

Of course, my K5 might be slightly different to yours... but I'm sure it's better than Adobe Standard

Profiling and working through all the combinations is time consuming (I profiled all ISOs on both cameras).


So.... would I recommend the QPcard203? Yes, if you understand colour management and profiling However, once profiled, there's little requirement to process for every shot (unless absolutely colour critical - as in product imaging). So, it's a bit expensive just to try out, but an excellent tool nonetheless.

Matt

The ones in our road look like daylight.
Took a shot of a QPcard... Will process later
Matt

Will find out when it gets dark
Matt

We've got white LED lamps in our road in Sussex

Had them for several months...

...it takes a bit of getting used to if you wake up in the middle of the night and see white light coming from outside.

Matt

Have done it many times with the FA50/1.4 Light, compact, great bokeh too - gets you thinking more carefully about composition

Used to have lots of primes, but since getting a pair of DA* I only have the 50mm left...

Matt

As a firmware developer, it sounds like techno-speak for "We goofed up and there's a bug that can rear its ugly head, but it's too complicated to explain exactly when and how"
(or too embarrassing )

Matt

Gadzooks!

Matt

Is that a 1500mm telescope being converted into an effective 8250mm lens? Or was that a 270mm telescope effectively being 1500mm?

It'll be interesting to see a moon shot with that....

Matt

Not necessarily.... only if you don't understand colour management

Photoshop will detect the colour space of the incoming image and has options for converting into your working space. So you can choose to work only in AdobeRGB within PS and convert anything that isn't when you open it.

BUT, you must convert back to sRGB when outputting for the web. PS-CS5 onwards will automatically convert to sRGB (AFAIK), whereas earlier versions you had to manually convert to sRGB before Save For Web (i.e. Take final image, resize, sharpen, convert to sRGB, then Save For Web)

If you shoot RAW then don't worry about it
You can work in sRGB until you find an image that's getting colour-posterized because you're pushing it too hard in PS then just re-output in ProPhoto colour space at 16bits (one advantage for doing PP in layers )


If you're not sure on colour management then definitely stick with sRGB

Matt

There's nothing to tap into
It's the lack of bulk in the plastic posts that's the problem! Nothing really to glue, no space to Araldite, and only able to sink something deeper into the more solid parts of the plastic.

That said, I've used the FA80-320 on a couple of trips so far, and it's holding well
IQ is good too!
Matt