Canon 1Ds Mark III Workflow

Got a chance to work on some images last night.  Had to pull myself away at midnight.  Here are a couple of thoughts.

RAW file size is about 20 MB as expected.  The TIFF file with just the Background layer is 120 MB.  That’s about four times larger than I’m used to.  I worked on one image using my regular workflow and it ended up at over 800 MB.  A second TIFF was over 500 MB.  File size has become an issue overnight.  And I just added a 1 terabyte external drive to my workstation.

Now, my normal workflow begins with a PS action that does three things –

  1. Duplicate the Background layer and apply the USM filter to it at 25,50,0.  I vary the Amount (the 25) to get the desired amount of ‘pop’.
  2. Run PhotoKit capture sharpener
  3. Create two layer groups titled Global Changes and Local Changes.

You can imagine that duplicating the Background layer in increases my 120 MB TIFF to 240 MB.  I’m not sure how much the PK capture sharpening adds (I’ll need to check that out soon).

However, LR 1.3 has a new control in the Presence section – Clarity.  It’s pretty clear that this does exactly what the USM 25,50,0 filter does.  So, I can save an average of 120 MB per image by using this LR control instead of doing the equivalent thing in PS.

LR has a preset in the Developer module called General – Punch which applies Clarity at 50 and Vibrance at +25.  This is going to be in my LR workflow from now on.

DxO doesn’t support the 1Ds Mark III yet so I’m waiting for that so I can put it back in the workflow.  That’s going to be extreme interesting now that I’m shooting with a full frame sensor.  My two 24 mm zooms are all of a sudden behaving like real wide-angle lenses with barrel distortion and everything.  This is really cool because at 24mm on my 10D these lenses acts more like a 35mm lenses.  Hopefully DxO will come out with their support for the 1Ds Mark III soon.  I believe it’s scheduled for sometime before the end of February.

On another topic, the 1Ds’ are famous for requiring the best glass, that the pixel count is so great that poorer quality lenses really stand out – in a bad way.  The same holds true for hand held shooting, especially with a telephoto.  One of the images I worked on last night was using my 70-200 f2.8L at full telephoto.  I was shooting hand held and even though the shutter speed was twice the focal length, there was still some fuzziness.  I’ll try the shot again this afternoon, this time on a tripod, to see if it makes a difference.

That’s enough for now but there’s much, much more to come so stay tuned.

See the photographs on my website.

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Author: doinlight

Ralph Nordstrom is an award-winning fine art landscape photographer and educator. He lives in Southern California and leads photography workshops throughout the Western United States.

4 thoughts on “Canon 1Ds Mark III Workflow”

  1. Brett,
    Thanks for taking the time to respond with a comment.

    If you haven’t tried USM at 25,50,0 just give it a try. It doesn’t create the halos that it does at the more traditional settings of 25,1,0. The former settings create a ‘pop’ to the image that gives it a luminance and glow that is truly amazing.

    I agree with you that sharpening should be done as the last step. In fact, I always perform output sharpening once the image is sized for printing. The reason I like the PhotoKit shapener is because it gives you two sharpeners – Capture and Output. The role of the capture sharpener is to correct the softness created by the sensor and the low-pass filter in front of it. The effect is in many cases barely noticeable. The intent is to give you a starting image that reproduces the image created by the lens. The Output sharpener is the last step and does more traditional sharpening but takes into account the dpi of your final image and the target output medium – dot matrix, web, etc. So yes, I totally agree with you. The capture sharpening I perform is just to give the image a little nudge. Another nice thing about both of these sharpening steps is they are done as layers and there are in fact two layers for each – light contour and dark contour. This gives you a great deal of control.

  2. Clarity does not do what USM does. It’s totally different. Use it on a subject silhouetted against a solid light background and you’ll see how. Clarity is fine in small doses but too much can trash an image. It should be applied on a per file basis and not as a preset. Plus, you shouldn’t be sharpening images until you know what the end print size and use will be, and there’s no reason a 21mp file should become 800mb.

  3. One of the things I discovered, although I knew it was going to happen, when I converted to the 5D is that a wide angle lens is really a wide angle lens.

    That’s very cool.

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