RomiK

OK I think I know now where you have problem - you seem not to have the right tools to develop in HDR yet you have a good read of theory and so you think it's where you want to give advice. The problem is though that without HDR display - you still did not say what brand and type you have available - all these reads about HDR are just reads. As you mentioned that you didn't like resulting .avif from your grades - it is because you grade your raw files blind. You can't go by the visualizations tools in Lightroom as their intended purpose is from other direction - to show where your HDR image may have problems on SDR screen (or in JPEG). We both will probably agree on that the photography is not about the mathematical formulas, stops and corners but it is an art of light and double that for underwater images. So when grading image for HDR you just need to see what you are doing. See these images will spring to life if processed for HDR (you could have attach its raw files btw) and the water surface will look quite different from what you think it might. Once you will have the right tools available you will see that the world of HDR is a bit different from what you thought you knew. And then with the level of your expressionism you will be able to offer excellent analysis I am sure. Good luck.

OK! Challenge accepted 🤣. Why don't you post here some of your raw file where you really don't see an HDR sense for me to take a crack on it. In the meantime why don't you indulge yourself in attached raw file and try to make a jpeg out of it which would at least try to be close to an HDR version attached here as well. Here is SDR jpeg for others to see: And here is an instagram link to an HDR version https://www.instagram.com/p/C5vKWesNI0n/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== (must view it on Chrome browser and HDR monitor or instagram app and HDR phone) Just to be fair tell me what tech are you using so we don't have false expectations. We have same cameras - A1, I use Apple Pro Display XDR for image adjustment and iPhone13Pro for mobile platforms. And so we could make proper assertion as to who does or does not understand the topic 🤣 20240319-112116.ARW 20240319-112116.avif

🤣 you haven't even try have you? 🤣 yet you already form opinion 🤣. Listen, you need real HDR screen to edit and view. It means Apple XDR on MacBook Pro, iPad Pro or XDR display (studio display won't cut it really), not many good HDR LCD monitors with brightness in range of 1600nits out there and you need that because black on LCD isn't really black, OLED TV will do fine or just get a phone with bright HDR display and Lightroom on it. Any reference desktop monitor you have from the past won't really cut it. You need that brightness to enjoy and see what other viewers on their iPhones and Samsungs will see. Then take any of your raw files from the past and play. The best if they include water surface. And you will see how strong of a use case underwater photography is for HDR. Images will brighten up like you'd be there again. Good luck 🤙 Btw if you ask Siri what 'adobe' is she will answer with some clay kind of material... That's how significant is Adobe as a company for the world. Yet Instagram is used by billions so to say that 'Adobe has been supporting HDR for photos since some time now' is like an empty argument really... so many great technologies has been introduced in the past but unless you get people using them they are just that - technologies. And the truth is that Instagram brought HDR photos to the masses.

As of the end of March Instagram supports serving HDR images. You must be on an HDR screen equipped phone (such as iPhone X and later) or on desktop with HDR monitor (such as OLED TV) and Google Chrome browser (Safari as of today don't support this). This image is SDR jpeg. For HDR version you either have to head over to my Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/C5nr1kMNu8u/ or download attached file on your HDR phone (iOS Photos app will display fine) or desktop and view it with Chrome browser. Some images will benefit from HDR immensely (such as this type of cenote image) others not so much or a bit (especially those shot with full strobe power without water surface background). Either way the HDR revolution is here (power of social media 🙂 ) and all of us shooting RAW on big sensors will benefit from it (phone and gopro shooters not so much). As well as consumers of our images 🙂 . Cheers 🤙 20221212-141719-TajMaha.avif

I vote this best answer 🙂 . I would add one variation and that would be image with strobes and natural lights. Strobed pictures fall within 1) and 2) and natural light wrecks etc being a 3) as they could take ages and still not being an art 🤣

you've got message

Shinobi does monitor on the LUT - you either import your own and let Shinobi interpret it or send a LUT through (which Sony A7x can't do) and choose native. The difference between Ninja and Shinobi the way I understand it is that by applying the LUT in Ninja also the exposure tools reflect on the LUT while Shinobi exposure tools reflect on clean signal coming from the camera and LUT is being used only as a monitoring tool. So Shinobi is a better monitor than Ninja. As for bulk it would be great for readers to understand that they are going to add bulk to their setup one way or another as the Chinese bricks need buoyancy balancing and so it is much much better have bulkier but neutral monitor then slim brick and compensation on it or elsewhere. Because good balanced rig is not neutrally floating total. Good balanced rig ideally consist of weight neutral components - housing, strobes, lights etc. Only then you are not fighting gravity while shooting at various angles.

Yes, I don’t question their topside products 👍 all of them Chinese work somewhat ok and do support LUTs. Just the underwater interpretations of them - they shovel that Feelworld and others into waterproof envelope and sell. And borrow specs from topside products. Kraken and Weefine the same thing. Off course none of them support LUTs or firmware upgrades as there is no slot out SD card or attach USB. Kraken did not bother to answer this directly but Bluewater Photo relayed and the answer was clear. No way. Good luck. The help of monitor is awesome.

🤣 I wouldn't take you for a person accepting Chinese specs at face value. Let me know their answer when you ask them 'how' (they take LUTs). My bet is on deep silence 🤣. And if you think it through try to imagine how would they take them 🤣. You already have the best monitors - just buy the housing.

a.k.a. the Brick... all of these are north of negative 600g if not more... kraken weefine the same story... no volume to counter the weight of metal ...

@Interceptor121 My jab at your Malpello video hit the nerve didn’t it ? 😂😂😂 Listen it’s fine to have encyclopedic knowledge but for the sake of readers you really shouldn’t be giving advices where you don’t have practical experience. There is so much blabber in what you write here it’s difficult to put the facts straight. I really recommend you to borrow housing, do few dives and then give advices. The lens analysis you have are fine but the monitor and HDR standards blabber are just nonsense 🤙

I still am in Maldives 😁🤙. Emperor is a good company I was with in October. Now on Horizon 3 things are more flexible but that’s not always a good thing 🙈😁 Before you spend money on Ninja housing I would strongly recommend to read through the link below and especially the end of that review. My conclusion was that if I absolutely didn’t need to record raw I would be better off with Shinobi and now my experience from actually using the monitor underwater confirmed it was a right choice. IMO exposure tools are absolutely necessary when exposing for HDR as camera monitor can’t be trusted for that and is impractical to use. Also it seems the Luts are recorded if used for interpreting on monitor etc… just read it and judge for yourself. Good luck and happy shooting in Maldives 🤙 https://www.pauljoy.com/2021/12/atomos-ninja-v-vs-shinobi-as-a-monitor/

True. I only wanted to express frustration with these bricks coming up as I really wanted to give Kraken a shot with their proclaimed 3000nits brightness but today I am glad I didn’t as displaying HDMI signal is one thing and processing/conforming that signal into different standards is whole different ballgame. There companies such as Atomos $ or SmallHD $$$$ come to play. I also was using 450nits Weefine Wed7 on about 30 dives and know this wouldn’t be an avenue (for me anyway). That 1000nits HDR Shinobi brightness of properly interpreted Slog3 is a gem.

Here are screen grabs from an iPhone video which might demonstrate After 40 dives with Shinobi and some experience with it - and after some experience with Kraken marketing facts where company admitted you cannot install LUTs on their monitor indeed 🙈🤣 I would caution anyone before buying these cheap chinese monitors. There are many issues in what you want to see on that monitor and what your camera can produce and you really - in 2024 with all iPhones and Samsungs with HDR screens - do not want a monitor which only mimic SDR images coming from cameras... it is really more complex issue. But off course without aspirations for HDR video they will work well for photography 👍👍. But also and it was mentioned in this thread the buoyancy is an issue and bulky monitor with housing might end up being better choice then more compact brick. Good luck everyone in selecting their monitor.

Everything is going to HDR, like it or not. It's just a matter of time. Now you can have your opinion about the quality of this or that but as well as we all can have wet dreams we have to deal with what we have as for tools and as for consuming the results. And so we have Shinobi as HDR monitor and YouTube or private (OLED the best) TVs. As far as I understand HDR in video is far away from what HDR was originally in still photography - rather than relatively flat image of HDR photos in the past it's a high highs low blacks images of iPhones and MacBook Pro XDR displays. And OLED TVs with deep blacks. Matter of fact deeper black you have lower the highs you need in order to deliver. Lookup YT video of one of Hollywood best colorist describing how he grades movies for HDR. So your opinion of how this or that company deals with what you think is HDR is a bit irrelevant as it's not you who defines this standard. And so yes, Shinobi IS an HDR monitor. With all of its 1000 nits brightness. Not meaning this sounding disparaging btw. From practical standpoint a monitor is extremely related to HDR as without it (HDR monitor) you can't properly expose, not using the built in camera screen and by a long shot. In some situation you see just the waveform and practically nothing else. I am attaching couple screenshots from an iPhone video which might show the issue at hand.

Yes, I only shoot Slog3 and through PQ conversion deliver in HLG (I can see eyebrows raised everywhere 😂 ). I work in FCPX. Shinobi in Nauticam attached to camera by my special prototype bracket 😁 is just awesome no problems to use in currents and jumping from boat. The thing with HDR exposure is that you need to expose so much that in (especially) low contrast environment the camera monitor will show white screen basically. And did I say forget about what you think you know about ISO when exposing for Slog3 on Sony A1 at least 😁🤙. Next dive coming shortly 🤙

You want to read this thread. It also touches the subject of FX3 being actually best Sony camera for hybrid shooting I am currently in Maldives on a maiden voyage with Shinobi and I can attest that without HDR monitor it’s really and 100% impossible produce HDR videos underwater 😁. Some review will be coming.

I just made it to Maldives southern tip 🤙 will try to upload the file somewhere and post the link.

Thank you for explanation, makes sense 👍 Very interesting. It seems like that Sony's very own (or contracted) devteam omitted possibility of these high temperature WB when they were creating profiles and then by virtue of APIs this morphed further to other dev teams of other companies... Or perhaps they just officially don't support these higher values as perhaps officially these may not be reliable (similar to what they say about WB with Slog3) and so their published profiles end with 9900 and that's it... It's a shame, I like the colors the most, perhaps will need to export these scenarios from Sony as tiff. Either way it would be interesting so see and compare default output of Canon Nikon and newer Panasonics in these high temp WB situations.

Not sure if it's the right forum but this seems to me an infrastructure issue rather than workflow or editing issue. Has anyone noticed - not only from Sony world but also Canon and Nikon if this issue has been noticed there - startling differences in interpretation - on occasion - of (fairly high) custom white balanced images (this 33000) between the vendor's own raw processor (in this case Sony) and industry standard like Adobe Lightroom and Camera raw and actually Apple too? I will let pictures talk, I didn't browse images with Sony's software before, always put them through Lightroom and was done with it... It's an engineering issue, nothing we could do about, just curious if anyone run into this Sony Viewer initial view : Sony's metadata view Ligtroom initial view Lightroom after moving purple and magenta hues all the way to the left OSX Finder preview - this is how it would turn in Apple photos too: try

WOW! Superb images 👏👏👏 What was the technique behind the blurred in motion ones? You moving camera with front curtain? Or moving the other way with rear curtain? Or how? 🙂

This should be set in stone 👏👏👏

I too am perplexed looking at some of your answers 🤣 it's like you'd be using ChatGPT for that 🤣 . Listen I don't doubt you have read the theory, you have nice extensive blog site for that. But throwing numbers around is not the same as understand these numbers and being able to use them. Your underwater footage from Malpello, for example, is outright awful. Let me guess - you were chasing sharks and eagle rays with your mask on a viewfinder which is so bright you had no idea you were underexposing all the time. And the resulting footage is so shaking it reminds me of my students first tries with GoPro... There goes an answer for why you might benefit from using an external monitor too. External viewfinder will obstruct the rear camera display so much it's unusable. You can review - so you don't feel like I'd be bashing your work without throwing in mine - some of my footage from Cocos, where diving conditions are similar to Malpello, also with A1 also no lights with custom WB plus there is some GoPro here and there mixed in. Better to watch on HDR capable screen and make sure YT shows that HDR symbol. What I want to say it's fine to debate numbers where appropriate but this thread was about on-hand experience in dealing with specific challenges, it wasn't really a question for theoretic mentors but it's great you have shown that throwing numbers around does not have to translate to end results necessarily.

You've got it wrong... it's not that slog3 underexposes. It is that you don't know how to expose properly for Slog3. Slog3 is not meant to be exposed on autopilot, just research something about exposing for grey cards etc... Of course underwater we can't adjust exposure using other tools, that's where waveforms come handy and you should forget about the exposure correction, just expose based on waveforms and what you see on monitor - and there you have it - without HDR monitor and HDR at least some interpretation of log color gamut on that monitor you can't do much. Zebras etc might help but it's like shooting blind. You might want to give some credit to Atomos folks, they might know just a little more than you do. I will add that LUTs are just a starting point in underwater color grading anyway, given so variable light and white balance conditions. So Atomos's interpretation of Slog gamut to PQ gives you that starting point during the creative process. With Slog3 still pictures there is different problem - and that is that current popular software tools like Lightroom can't interpret the raw files shot in Slog3 very well especially if shot with aggressive custom white balance like when shooting at 30m depth. Sony's own imaging desktop app can do this but the workflow is not as smooth. You need to play with those apps to see for yourself and please don't dismiss this idea right away like you usually do based on your understanding of the world. There is whole galaxy beyond that 🙂 . Happy shooting

Not quite agree there... here is Sony LUT for HDR conversion... it shows less information in highlights than PQ. To choose PQ to view does not mean I am going to deliver PQ. I am going to grade HLG. But since I have no option to reshoot or work with lights underwater I need to know the most information I could what am I recording. So empirically PQ conversion of Sgamut shows the most truthful image of what is being recorded and that is important to me. Edit: this image taken several minutes after first two and sun is going down so... doesn't change anything on the why PQ is better then Sony LUTs to review. Just explaining a bit different image