Few from Sunday at Farnbrough 2010

Hi Pete
Like the photos a lot the conditions there were not great on Sunday for photography.

I understand what you mean about the BBMF flying their fighters very conservatively, But I tend to feel this is not such a bad thing.
We have many fine warbird pilots putting Spitfires and Hurricanes through their paces including I would add John Romaine to the list you give for Spitfire pilots and Stu Goldspink is rather good in a Hurricane.

Nice shots there I went sunday too first time aswel shame those aircraft did not stay hopefully the 2012 one they will though I hope to see it next year, What do you mean by this :confused:

ATB
James

Hi James,

The BBMF aircraft are always flown very cautiously, from several people i have spoken to who fly Spits and Hurricanes (or have done in the past) have said that the BBMF have a load limit on the airframes they cant pull more then a certain amount of stress on the airframe through orders from the C/O.

If you watch thier displays its always very calm and timid, almost graceful but the aircraft are not normally put through what they were designed for, there is (in my opinion) a lack of energy in the displays. Compare that to Nigel Lamb in 434 or Dan Griffiths in Ta805 and you will see how they put the machine through its paces and show what a great machine the Spitfire is.

They are just too worried about the airframes in my opinion.

ACR 6.0 that comes as part of CS5 is rubbish! They’ve completely screwed up the sharpening which is really annoying as I’ve been sharpening happily in RAW since CS2 and I have no idea why they’ve changed something that worked so well. The settings I mentioned work great in CS4 (ACR 5.6) but as you say, won’t work in CS5. I deleted the trial of CS5 and went back to using CS4, so unfortunately I can’t help with settings in CS5.

I have to say though, in my experience the settings you’re using do seem very aggressive. The way digital photography works makes it an inherently soft medium; a very basic explanation of how sharpening works is that it darkens one side of a line of contrast and lightens the other (so images with poor contrast also often look much softer). The Radius control is sharpening software adjusts how wide the area that’s affected is, and if you make it too large then it will in fact do the exact opposite of what you want to achieve by making defining edges wider and thus actually blurring the image rather than sharpening it. As a general rule I use a radius no larger than 0.6 for full size images and no larger than 0.3 for images between 1024 and 1600 pixels wide, although of course that’s in either Photoshop itself or previous versions of ACR, not CS5.

You may actually find that you achieve better results by sharpening the JPEG image rather than RAW. I know the immediate reaction from most RAW shooters when this is suggested is an immediate and emphatic no, but it’s important to note that the idea RAW editing is lossless is actually something of a myth. The higher bit rate means you’re shifting more data around when you edit so you’re less likely to run into compression problems (8 bit splits each channel into 256 levels of brightness whereas 12 bit splits each into 4096 levels), but such problems only really occur on JPEG images when extreme adjustments are being made (like massive mid-tone correction using Curves which often visibly compresses the highlights). There’s absolutely no technical reason why you shouldn’t get the same quality from a well exposed JPEG as you would from a RAW file, bearing in mind that if editing for the internet you ultimately end up with an 8 bit JPEG anyway. So, as ACR 6.0 is kinda screwed up perhaps you could try doing things like white balance correction, adding saturation and adjusting brightness/contrast in RAW and then sharpening/cropping in JPEG.

Just an idea anyway. 🙂

Paul

Excellent thoughts Paul, I will re-edit some of the ones i have posted here and see what the results are like, I must admit that the 2nd round of editting i do does do alot, I will have a play and drop ya an update with what I find.

I like alot of the CS5 features aside from the ACR sharperning, like the clipping and content aware features so i think i would find it hard to dump CS5 but i will have a tinker 🙂

all the best all

Pete

ACR 6.0 that comes as part of CS5 is rubbish! They’ve completely screwed up the sharpening which is really annoying as I’ve been sharpening happily in RAW since CS2 and I have no idea why they’ve changed something that worked so well. The settings I mentioned work great in CS4 (ACR 5.6) but as you say, won’t work in CS5. I deleted the trial of CS5 and went back to using CS4, so unfortunately I can’t help with settings in CS5.

I have to say though, in my experience the settings you’re using do seem very aggressive. The way digital photography works makes it an inherently soft medium; a very basic explanation of how sharpening works is that it darkens one side of a line of contrast and lightens the other (so images with poor contrast also often look much softer). The Radius control is sharpening software adjusts how wide the area that’s affected is, and if you make it too large then it will in fact do the exact opposite of what you want to achieve by making defining edges wider and thus actually blurring the image rather than sharpening it. As a general rule I use a radius no larger than 0.6 for full size images and no larger than 0.3 for images between 1024 and 1600 pixels wide, although of course that’s in either Photoshop itself or previous versions of ACR, not CS5.

You may actually find that you achieve better results by sharpening the JPEG image rather than RAW. I know the immediate reaction from most RAW shooters when this is suggested is an immediate and emphatic no, but it’s important to note that the idea RAW editing is lossless is actually something of a myth. The higher bit rate means you’re shifting more data around when you edit so you’re less likely to run into compression problems (8 bit splits each channel into 256 levels of brightness whereas 12 bit splits each into 4096 levels), but such problems only really occur on JPEG images when extreme adjustments are being made (like massive mid-tone correction using Curves which often visibly compresses the highlights). There’s absolutely no technical reason why you shouldn’t get the same quality from a well exposed JPEG as you would from a RAW file, bearing in mind that if editing for the internet you ultimately end up with an 8 bit JPEG anyway. So, as ACR 6.0 is kinda screwed up perhaps you could try doing things like white balance correction, adding saturation and adjusting brightness/contrast in RAW and then sharpening/cropping in JPEG.

Just an idea anyway. 🙂

Paul

Nice shots there I went sunday too first time aswel shame those aircraft did not stay hopefully the 2012 one they will though I hope to see it next year, What do you mean by this :confused:

ATB
James

Hi Paul

Do all my shooting in Raw 😉

Much easier to recovery images should there be a problem or some such

The settings i used were reccomended to me by a friend who seemed to be getting good results

What settings do you use for RAW?

I tried the sharpening from the raw converter in CS5 but found it to introduce to much noise 🙁

Hi Peter,

I have to say, those settings sound quite dramatic to say the least! Most of my sharpening is done in RAW with a little boost after re-sizing, but assuming you shoot JPEG then try this:

When you open the photo (assuming it doesn’t need any significant brightness/contrast adjustments) make your very first step to sharpen at 110% with a Radius of 0.6 and Threshold of 0. Then crop, make all other necessary adjustments, resize and then add another pass of sharpening at around 40%, Radius of 0.3 and Threshold 0.

Starting with these settings should give much cleaner results, and of course you can fiddle until you find something that works well for you. You should certainly see an immediate improvement though. 🙂

Paul

Hi Peter,

Some superbly captured images although several are very aggressively sharpened which is really letting down an otherwise excellent set. What kind of sharpening settings are you using? With a slightly different sharpening technique the quality of these will be nothing short of stunning!

Paul

Hi Paul,

for quite some time i have tried different sharpening methods on pictures, this set were done with 2 rounds of USM in Cs5 with varying degrees on them.

first round would be something in the kin of 130-150% @ 2-2.5 radius with a threshold of 6-9

second round would be something like 200-300% @ .5-.7 radius with same threshold.

I have tried topaz to help sharpen but find that it also introduces alot of noise into the pictures.

How would you go about it?

Many Thanks

Peter

Cool pictures.

Hi Peter,

Some superbly captured images although several are very aggressively sharpened which is really letting down an otherwise excellent set. What kind of sharpening settings are you using? With a slightly different sharpening technique the quality of these will be nothing short of stunning!

Paul

I must admit that i was quite dissapointed that I didnt get to see it display.

I was situated just in front of the grandstand ( I actually had a grandstand ticked but the speakers were getting in alot of my shots and it was annoying me, so i relocated to the ground level)

Thanks – spotted your note preceding the pics as well

Hi Mate

It took off just after 9:16 in the morning, i was pitched up enjoying a cuppa and it taxied past me and took off banked left at end of the runway and was the last we saw of it

Thanks for the positives all 🙂

Hi Pete
Thanks for the update on the C27J but I also notice since that you’d made a comment preceding your pics which I missed (was so keen to look at your excellent work with the lens).

The C27J was one of my favourite displays at Farnborough 2008 and I saw it static on Saturday 24 July and was hoping I’d see it flying on Sunday 25, never knowing I’d have to be a very early worm to catch it at 9.16 am.

Pity it has great market potential and makes a fun/great display to watch.

I like the nice crisp shots especially the Sea Hawk

Nice Herk and Spartan, Pete. What equipment are you using and what PP software?
RR

Hi Mate,

I was using a Nikon D2x, with a 70-200 AF-s Vr F2.8 with a 1.7x Teleconverter attached.

I use Nikon capture for the initial Raw conversion, do the levels and curves in there and any distortion control. Then save the image as a Tiff and open in CS5 to do the sharpening and any Noise reduction.

Glad that you all like the images 🙂

Considering the weather etc i was very pleased 😀

Fabulous..you do take a spectacular picture

Nice Herk and Spartan, Pete. What equipment are you using and what PP software?
RR

Hi Mate

It took off just after 9:16 in the morning, i was pitched up enjoying a cuppa and it taxied past me and took off banked left at end of the runway and was the last we saw of it

Thanks for the positives all 🙂

Great pics; what time did the C27J Spartan fly on Sun 25 July ?

Nice pics, thanks.

What time did the C27J Spartan take to the air on Sunday 25 July?

I was in the grandstand from the start of display flying until 4 pm and cannot recall seeing the C27J go up while I was there, although the C130 did display as scheulded?

Yes I agree with the first reply some lovely shots there,:).Were the crowds as bad as Saturday or would you be none the wiser anyway well done.

Very nice. Love the Seahawk pic.