S2 Settings for Skin

[snapthepicture]

Hey,
I do a lot of people shooting. One of the things I have noticed is that certain colors that reproduce stronger than others. Even though I have my camera on "org" for all the settings, I am getting my reds in the skin tones that are seperating from the others. I am trying to maintain the organic quality of the skin. I use mix lighting depending on the mood I am setting. I do use pops that are made for digital, like the Quantum T2digital. What are you people setting your cameras at and are you getting good skin tones?
Also, has anyone used the modual to dedicate the T2 to the S2?

I have a droplet for photoshop that I automatically throw my digital card in. It will open photoshop, run my preset actions (rotate, sharpen slightly, desaturate, save to one folder, resize for web and save to another folder)
I have been blaming my softness issue on my less quality lenses, But after renting the top of the line lenses, I have seen no difference. I really don't like sharpening my images digitally.
Bruno
SnapThePicture.com (http://www.snapthepicture.com)

[Tom Nolle]

I assume you're shooting to JPG? If so, you'll probably have to do manual white balancing to deal with the shift in color temperature from your light sources. In RAW, the EX converter will let you do that on conversion.

Most digital images need sharpening, particularly for print. Even slides scanned with the top-line Nikon film scanners will have to be sharpened considerably for print use and some sharpening is still usually needed even for web viewing, IMHO.

Tom

[snapthepicture]

Well, that's good to hear.
I have always shot my RZ 67 or the Contax 645 with the Ziess lenses. Then I have drum scans done on them so I never needed to sharpen them. I see images all day long of digital files that look like they were shot with a Hass, but I have no Idea how much work was done on them. Well, thanks for the info.
Bruno

[Tom V]

I use ORG ORG OFF for most of my shooting, preferring to make all my adjustments and sharpening in Photoshop.

Regarding sharpening, I think every digital image needs sharpening. The Fuji S2 and as far as I know, all other DSLRs have a "filter" over the sensor to protect it. (when you clean your sensor, you're really cleaning the layer of glass on it, not the sensors themselves.) Some people say that this layer of glass acts as a diffuser, which helps when the sensor data is merged into pixels for your screen. (Otherwise you would have rows of red, green, & blue pixels if you enlarged your image far enough.) I always sharpen my S2 images.

On some of my most recent "Send film out for scanning" jobs, I requested that the technicans NOT sharpen the scans. They insisted. I insisted. I got my scans back from a high-end flatbed scanner - yuck. I thought they looked fuzzy because it was a flatbed. I sent the film to another company for drum scans. I told them no sharpening. I got the files back, and upon close inspection, I could tell they were sharpened (and in cmyk - no thanks!). I had them redo the drum scans, and I was surprised that they were not that much better than the original high-end flatbed scan. I learned that I could duplicate the drum scanner's sharpening with USM settings of 400%, .3, !=5px. I applied similar USM to the original flat-bed scans and surprise - they looked great. I think that even high-end scanner software has defaults for USM to make up for the softness caused by scanning into the digital realm. Even a drum scanner has a layer of glass over the sensor.

Judging and printing of skintone is highly subjective, and depends on the correct application of ALL the variables in color management from calibrated monitor to calibrated output.

(Oh boy, I am getting up to 300 posts! What a "blabbermouth!")

[snapthepicture]

Yeah, that's the way I sharpen mine too. A more effective way of sharpening is to also put your image into Lab mode, then select the lightness channel and do your USM from there. It's works wonders. That is mainly for printing though. You can't see a difference that much on the monitor. Thanks for your input and that is exactly the way I have been shooting my work.http://www.snapthepicture.com/composite.jpg