James Mok’s Soliloquy

and camera in the world.

It has been almost 10 years since the modern digital cameras has been in the market. Like their film counterparts, some people remain indulging themselves with so called “color of the lenses”. That is, a certain color character is captured on films or on the digital sensors for a certain given lens.

The fact of the matter is, even if one is so obsessed with that camera lens color, films have their own color characteristics, digital sensors have their own color characteristics, digital camera firmware have their own color characteristics, printer lenses have their own color characteristics, printers have their own color characteristic, editing softwares, monitors, printers all needed to be color profiled, but even then, monitors have their limitations in reproducing the entire gamut of the color profile. How does one get a reference as to the exact color of each particular camera lens then? Even if we look through the lens with our naked eyes, human eyes have different perceptions making us see the same color differently anyway.

The classic example would be the obsession of the color of Leica camera lenses. Now that Leica themselves have their own brand of (Panasonic made) digital cameras, traditional Leica M model lenses can now be used on their M8 digital camera bodies, which is every die-hard Leica fan ever dreamt for getting that “Leica lens color” on a digitally captured file. But are we truly getting that Leica lens color? Ever since the Leica M8 digital camera has been in production, it has been plagued with several bugs. Anyone of the bugs or all of them could have resulted in affecting the image quality. One and the only one of the solutions thus far that has been implemented by Leica is to use a special filter on the front on a Leica lens. Immediately, this alters the original quality/color of the Leica lens. Leica is apparently giving away 2 of these filters in any choice of sizes for their M8 camera owners free of charge. But for 3 lens or more owners, they would need to buy extra filters.

Just a few days ago, Leica introduce a new firmware to fix a bug where there is color shift in the corners of an image when the filter is being used. This makes the concept of the color of Leica lens interesting. Assuming the digital sensor of an M8 mimics the color of a certain film that made Leica die-hard fans so fond of, whichever one of the many films that might have been, perhaps the out of production Kodachrome and more specifically the ASA 25 version, add the color of the filter and then add the color of the new firmware….. can we possibly end up with anything that is even remotely similar to what it could have been caputured on film - whichever film that might have been to begin with? To be reproduced on any computer monitor?! Under any type of ambient light?!!!

So then just what is that lens color, generally speaking, and how does one go about capturing and reproducing it anyway?

For the longest time, I have been using the free version of Neat Image on the Mac to de-noise high ISO images of my small photos posted for Web viewing. After shooting several wedding banquets, plus one more set of wedding banquet photos about to be post-processed, I had decided to purchase a de-noise software.

I downloaded the trial version of Imagenomic’s Noiseware Pro Plug-in along with their Prtraiture Plug-in as well as their RealGrain Plug-in and played with them for a few days just to see how another de-noise program stacks up to Neat Image, and decided I liked Noiseware a lot better than Neat Image. So I made the plunge on 31/03 and made a purchase for the entire Professional Plug-in suite which includes all three programs at a discounted price. Upon entering the data for the purchase, I saw an entry for a coupon code, so I held back on the data entry and tried to Google any possible coupon codes on the Web; and sure enough, I found a 20% off discount coupon code at LuckyOliver, among other 10% off coupon codes or expired coupon codes from other sites. Fortunately (for me), the one at LuckyOliver’s espired that very same day of 31/03 so I quicky copied their coupon code and hurried it back to Imagenomic to finish off my purchase. It took a few hour overnight for the confirmation and the activation codes to come through but I got the 20% off discount!

Noiseware is a lot easier to use than Neat Image and works better all round, IMO. Manual profiling is also much easier and unlike Neat Image, Noiseware can select multiple areas across the image even including detail areas. Whereas Neat Image can only do manual profiling on detailess and featureless areas of any given image. Detail preservation is also much easily done and made more easily understandable than Neat Image.

Portraiture, like the name implies, it’s for portraits. It deals specifically with skintones for highlighting, toning, as well as softhening. Just like the photos done on Playboy, Maxim, or HIM magazine.

RealGrain is a real gem on it’s own. Basically it puts film grain back onto any digital images similating several Agfa, Fuji, Ilford, and Kodak films. It can even convert color photos into respective film’s black and white tone. Of all the color to b&w conversion methods and free plug-in’s I have used over the years, RealGrain does the most pleasing job than all. Contrast and brightness treaking is also a cinch.

Overall, I am very please with the package.