Wow I can really see the difference in the colors. Gorgeous.

More detailed

Wow. the difference is pretty staggering

Not sure if brushing teeth

Or forcing Pixie Stix down throat

I'm actually waiting until I get my new studio lights to do a reshoot, so there is less distortion along the bottom

well, congrats, then. :) it's amazing what has happened with compact cameras the last few years...

Old camera make/model
New camera make/model

Enquiring minds want to know.

Yeah, me too. I'm kind of curious.

Old camera is Canon Powershot A590

New camera is Canon Powershot A3100 IS

Camera nerd finds this and is now curious what you use for lighting and whether you're balancing off a white card first or using a preset.

Of course I like the postprocessed one better for whatever reason (on my uncalibrated TFT panel), but good to know what results in what. (And interesting how whatever you used for the shadow detail got rendered 'invisible' by the 590 although I'm guessing the original started out more overexposed? Astolpho was having that kind of problem with the scanner, be interesting to know what the interaction between pigments vs. sensor-filters is.)

Well to get this setup, I did get a small diffusing photo tent and two white daylight bulbs. If their measurements were accurate they were only a little greener than accurate rgb balance (which isn't enough for some photo snobs, but they're really good for their price). Before I got the photo tent I had to wait for a cloudy day so I could get diffuse light

CFL? I've been dorking around after buying some LED bulbs (and generally trying to optimize 'daylight simulation' for reasons of personal biology) and what I've learned is that nearly all CFL spectra are really spiky (probably even a chunk of those sold as 'full spectrum' but someday I'll actually get a prism or grating to check). So that'd be an excuse for some otherwise-okay sensors to have crazy results. But the old one still kinda sucked under cloudy daylight?

LED phosphors seem to give smoother spectra with a big spike in blue that probably won't burn all our eyeballs out unless we look directly into them in a desk lamp an inch from our face, so if you ever get a Cree or just a regular incandescent plus the whitebalance button it'd be For Science to see if the results get better. (Also apparently blue light kinda wants to kill retinal cells and the blue LED spectrum might be the exact worst wavelength or not depending who you ask but you're probably safe if you don't put the LED bulb 2 inches from your eyes all day. (What is hard is getting 'how does this compare to standing out in the sun?' numbers for watts-per-area-at-exact-damaging-frequency.))


Apparently the sun is actually a little green but we're used to it plus have an atmosphere. Which probably explains why one set of daylight CFLs I got seem greenish compared to another. There also turns out to be a bunch of dimensions of slop for "white point" at a given CCT.

I happen to be ridiculously tired right now so I'm just doing the "this is everything I learned about lightbulbs this year!" brain dump in case any of it applies usefully.

Yes these are CFL bulbs, though they were specifically sold as photography bulbs. I haven't really checked much beyond that besides eyeballing everything and trying to make sure the image isn't washed out

Is the one on the left scanned in the brother mfc-6490? I kind of regret recommending it to anyone now, due to its poor color fidelity. Nice to have a cheap wide-format scanner/printer (and I still use it for printing my digital pencils onto watercolor paper) but lord, it's so unkind to my watercolors when I scan them back in.

No, I learned a while ago that the scanning was less kind to the colors than a half-decent photograph. But a high-quality scanner costs SO much more it's not even that funny

yeah thats why you have to get into color profiles for the scanners. a pain but makes it right

Ugh, don't you just hate it when a camera (or a scanner in my case) is really bad at color balance? I can never fix that in post for some reason.

Wow, that is a big difference.
On the new picture you can see the cheetah's color reflected on the zebra, like on her breasts and stomach and such.
But in the old picture those colors can't be seen. Every thing too light just gets whited out.
Pretty cool stuff you got there.

Very sexy and lucky stud. X3

I can see the highlights are now not-so-blowout-looking! Awesome! E=D

the color are really nice on the new cam.

can we get an updated large pic of that awesome looking zebra? :)

art +1up
hot +5up!!! X3

If I only had a little perfectly level stand to set my camera on to take a steady, straight picture, I wouldn't need a scanner either...

Yay! Cuteness!

Wow that's a lot of difference in color! Indeed it is worth it. :)

Have you tried Raw with a White Balance card and lightroom?

I have a photo tent and a couple natural light lamps now; the results I have gotten lately are very good

Camera? Why not use a scanner? It'll be superior to any camera, no matter the resolution. Plus they are cheap. I use a combined printer/photocopier/scanner from Samsung, myself.

Because scanners tend to completely destroy color fidelity

I did not notice that... they sometimes darken or brighten the colors, but that's what the levels tool is for. Or what do you mean by "fidelity"?

Can you not see the difference between the two pictures?

You did not say the old one was scanned, only that you replaced your camera. I assumed the old one was photographed too, but the resolution was worse.

No, the old one was scanned, and that was my best attempt at restoring the color

Oh, I see. Odd, I used to color with a pencil way back and never noticed much color loss with scanning. Then again, I haven't done that in a while as I color in Photoshop now, maybe newer scanners have issues with colors.