Having had a couple of weeks to digest and evaluate the results from my first outtings with the Fuji S2/Aquatica setup I would have to say my overall impression is more positive than I had anticipated. My macro and closeup shots look just as good, if not better, on the computer screen as any scanned film.
My only real disappointment is the color banding I am getting in the blue water area on a lot of my wide-angles. The image below was shot on the Oro Verde wreck on Grand Cayman. I shot in RAW but some banding is still visible.
Does anyone have any hints to avoid banding or are there any post processing software solutions to eliminate it.
Larry
Hi Larry,
What color setting are you using for your monitor? If it's just 8 bit, then you will get banding.
On my monitor, I don't see any banding in this shot.
Cheers
James
I've seen banding in blue water before. I believe I was told it was a Jpeg artifact. If you print from a non Jpeg file you won't get the banding.
I also don't see any banding in this image either. In fact I don't see much wrong with this shot at all! It takes me straight there. Looks to me like this shot was taken at about 11 am - and I'm surprised the wreck isn't crawling with divers!
I think that the blue backgrounds in my images are smoothest when I shoot in RAW - then output as a 16bit TIFF, sort out levels in PS and then convert to 8bit TIFF for saving.
The other (obvious) reason that your shot has a range of different blues in the background is that you are using a 10.5mm Fisheye - which sees such a wide angle of background that you always get a range of blues - rather than a nice clean single colour that you can achieve with a tighter lens.
Alex
Hi Larry,
What color setting are you using for your monitor? If it's just 8 bit, then you will get banding.
On my monitor, I don't see any banding in this shot.
Cheers
James
Hmmm....the settings that I have on my laptop are: 256 colors, High Color (16 bit,) True Color (24 bit,) True Color (32 bit.) When I change my setting to True Color (32 bit) I loose the banding. At High Color (16 bit,) I see it. This is an area that I'm a little fuzzy on. Thanks, I'm learning
Larry
The other (obvious) reason that your shot has a range of different blues in the background is that you are using a 10.5mm Fisheye - which sees such a wide angle of background that you always get a range of blues - rather than a nice clean single colour that you can achieve with a tighter lens.
Alex
Alex,
One thing I did notice about the 10.5 is that it excells at these kind of aireal view wide-angle reef/wreck shots. The corner to corner sharpeness is vey good and the circular distortion is not as noticable as it is in CFWA. Of course you have to position the horizon carefully and shoot from the right angle to get it to work
On my next trip to Bonaire I want to try the Windjammer using the 10.5 and available light at 1600. It could be interesting.
