Los Kop Dam Cheetahs

[Andre van As]

Hi
This is one of many pictures that I took at the Los Kop Dam Cheetah Research facility. Some of these animals were socialized but not completely tame. The facility had financial difficulties and all 35 animals were relocated to the Lente Rhoodee's game farm, Kapama, which borders on the Timbavati and Kruger National Park in S Africa. She is an avid naturalist and preservationist and they could not have gone to a better place. I am converting to wet scanning and will create an album of all of my cheetah shots when done. I wellcome all C&C

Bronica ETR and 150mm Seiko lens - both still in action
Exktachrome Professional 200 ISO
Scanned with Nikon Coolscan 9000 (Siverfast software)
Post processed in CS5 camera raw

[Kerry Perkins]

Andre, what a treat to see a medium format transparency here! Would be helpful if you could include your shutter speed and aperture. I don't have to ask about color temperature... Do you use a light meter? Long ago (late '60s) I had a Rolleiflex with wide angle and tele lenses! Love the format!

Nice that you could get this close to capture such a nice portrait. You were a little bit hindered by the harsh sunlight and the exposure looks like an average. I believe that the whites on the cat's mouth are over. I would suggest a little bit of NR on the background or a light blur tool. Really like the eye contact and intimacy. Very nice, hope to see the others!

[Andre van As]

Andre, what a treat to see a medium format transparency here! Would be helpful if you could include your shutter speed and aperture. I don't have to ask about color temperature... Do you use a light meter? Long ago (late '60s) I had a Rolleiflex with wide angle and tele lenses! Love the format!

Nice that you could get this close to capture such a nice portrait. You were a little bit hindered by the harsh sunlight and the exposure looks like an average. I believe that the whites on the cat's mouth are over. I would suggest a little bit of NR on the background or a light blur tool. Really like the eye contact and intimacy. Very nice, hope to see the others!

Hi Kerry
Thanks very much for your insightful comments and very helpful advice. I believe this exposure was at 1/125s and the f stop was most likely 5.6. The built in light meter is center weighted. Unfortunately I have no metadata on record as this was not available in that model. I must admit that as I am a relative novice with digital post processing I am often uncertain about how much tinkering I should do while scanning as the Silverfast software for the Nikon Scanner has many options and how much should be done in PS where it seems that the adjustments can be close to infinite. So while scanning I try to capture as much information as possible and make basic corrections like adjusting for color cast etc. I will get back into CS5 Camera Raw mode and and try to tune up the areas you suggested. I will rescan this slide wet (ScanScience) and see if sharper detail is captured and repost for your comments.

Thanks for the help.

[Kerry Perkins]

Andre, I really look forward to seeing the results of your work with this medium. You can certainly do a lot in post processing, but there is a point of diminishing returns and of course it is best to get as much quality as possible in the capture, development, and scanning. Thanks so much for sharing your work here.

[John Chardine]

I love it but I'm surprised that the image is so soft. I think the hardware including the scanner is up to more than this so maybe the original was a little soft. Perhaps some sharpening would work.

[Andre van As]

Andre, I really look forward to seeing the results of your work with this medium. You can certainly do a lot in post processing, but there is a point of diminishing returns and of course it is best to get as much quality as possible in the capture, development, and scanning. Thanks so much for sharing your work here.

Hi Kerry
Back to the drawing board and rescanned wet and tried to make some of the adjustments you and John recommended. Sharpened in Adobe RAW and did some noise reduction which helped a bit. Tried to get the whites around the mouth toned down but I was unable to get the result I hoped for. I suspect the original whites were a bit burned out and therefore not recoverable. Because of f5.6 overall sharpening did not work too well.
I will keep trying with some of the other images that I have of the cheetahs. Thanks for the help

Andre

[LeeFortier]

I love your Cheetah.

I commend you for shooting 'old fashioned way'. I sometimes miss it.

I played with your image in CS5 and found that I could increase the sharpness a bit.
I used a setting of Radius 0.4 and Amount of 70%. On my monitor, this appears sharper without going overbored. Just a suggestion.

[Andre van As]

I love your Cheetah.

I commend you for shooting 'old fashioned way'. I sometimes miss it.

I played with your image in CS5 and found that I could increase the sharpness a bit.
I used a setting of Radius 0.4 and Amount of 70%. On my monitor, this appears sharper without going overbored. Just a suggestion.

Hi Lee
Thanks for the suggestion. I will try it and agree with not going overboard as it reduces IQ.

Andre

[John Chardine]

The repost is still a little soft. I will try Topaz InFocus on the image when I get home. This software has a de-blurring algorithm that uses deconvolution, and in my experience works amazingly well. It does not suffer from the pseudo-sharpening techniques of unsharp mask which enhance the contrast at edges and can produce edge anomalies.

[Andre van As]

The repost is still a little soft. I will try Topaz InFocus on the image when I get home. This software has a de-blurring algorithm that uses deconvolution, and in my experience works amazingly well. It does not suffer from the pseudo-sharpening techniques of unsharp mask which enhance the contrast at edges and can produce edge anomalies.

Hi John
I look forward to the outcome of your generous offer to sharpen with Topaz. I became aware of this software from Loukie Viljoen and may have to add it to my work flow options. Would this replace the sharpening step in CS5?

Andre

[John Chardine]

Here's the results of a deblur using deconvolution in Topaz InFocus. Results would be much better with the full-resolution file, but I would be happy with this.

[Andre van As]

Here's the results of a deblur using deconvolution in Topaz InFocus. Results would be much better with the full-resolution file, but I would be happy with this.

John it does look better and as you say working with the original full .TIFF file would produce a better result. So onward to Topaz!

Thanks for the demo.

Andre

[Andre van As]

Here's the results of a deblur using deconvolution in Topaz InFocus. Results would be much better with the full-resolution file, but I would be happy with this.

John - Acquired Topaz and experimented on the original tiff a bit with InFocus with this result.

[John Chardine]

That's good Andre. You will be happy with the software. Play with it and of course don't be afraid to push a bit too far and then come back. I use usually use Generic blur and then play with the Blur radius, keeping the Suppress artifacts at about 0.2. With an image that is pretty sharp to begin with a Blur radius of about 1.00 to 1.20 works well. But again play with the levels and look at the result, ultimately picking one that you are happy with. In general I have found the deblur in Topaz InFocus to be far superior to Unsharp Mask or Smart Sharpen in Ps.

[Andre van As]

Hi John
Thanks to you Kerry and Lee for your encouraging advice. I appreciate your specific suggestions for Topaz as it is always nice to be able to use another person's experience as a starting point and frame of reference. I have a number of other images to scan and look forward to posting them. This experience has been great and I am glad I joined BPN.

[John Chardine]

You are welcome Andre. That's how BPN should work! That's how it does work!

You will be happy with the Topaz suite. There are other suites that are probably as good, but I really like Topaz. They have a good webinar program too, and they archived them here:

http://www.topazlabs.com/webinars/

[Andre van As]

Hi Kerry and John
I have revisited my very first effort with some PP using what I have learned over the past year re workflow, sharpening etc. I have included sharpening and denoise in ACR as well as toning down the whites in Topaz. Also reduced the saturation.

Let me know if there is an improvement

Thanks

Andre

[John Chardine]

Hi Andre- The repost is lighter than the other versions and on my calibrated monitor there's a bit of blue/magenta cast. The lightness has helped to fill the darker areas, which are even darker than the original film because of the dynamic-range compression you get with scanning. I think you are definitely getting there! I would remove the dark area lower right, de-noise the BG and run another round of sharpening on the subject.

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Andre, your last repost is definitely brighter and I think the whites are bit too hot. I would suggest something between this version and your previous repost in pane #13. Detail looks better, still some noise in the background to deal with. The nice thing about digital files is that you can experiment endlessly!