Sigma Interesting Fovean B&W blog articles

Thanks for the heads-up on these blogs.

I'm far more a landscape than street guy, so, apart from having to pack a sack full of batteries every time I head for the hills, coping with the quirks of my three DP Merrills is no big deal for me.

Igor's info on monochrome use was of great interest though and I hope to move more into this field than I have done so far.

Thanks again

Roy
 
Is there a way to extract the top layer of a Merrill X3F file to monochrome TIFF in batch without going in SPP?
It would sure make things a lot simpler, but I'm not sure if any of the X3F tools allows this.
 
A monochrome DNG raw file would improve the workflow significantly as well as delivering superb b&w images. I really think this is something that Sigma should consider to widen the appeal of the DP cameras.
 
Interesting article.. Thanks for sharing.

Unlike the Merrill cameras, I find the occ jpgs of the Quattro are so good, that one does not need to use spp 6.0.5 except for certain situations.

With the Sigma dp cameras, I tend to shoot somewhere between 70-90% monochrome mode. The monochrome images from these cameras are some of the best I have ever seen. There was a time I wanted a Leica mm. The dp cameras cured me of that gas attack.

In monochrome mode, there is a monochrome flag that is updated in the raw file output from the camera. When spp see it, it reverts to monochrome mode operations. However, the camera still writes all the RGB data to the raw file. Thus, it is a simple operation to change everything back to color in spp. In the Merrill the awb is left active in monochrome, in the Quattro they gave turned off awb according to the LCD indicators. Thus, reverting to color, the wb may be at issue.

Spp has a function to mark color raw to monochrome and vice versa (remove the monochrome flag in the raw file). Once this is done, u can batch convert to tiff in either monochrome or color. Spp 6 seems to have some bugs here right now.

Gary
 
For several days in the spring I shot with my Sigma DP Merrills set to B+W mode and often used a yellow filter. I haven't done a great deal with those sets of images, however these blog articles have inspired me to start examining the images. I often push images a little too far in Silver Efex which in itself adds an element of digital noise to the image. I've just extracted three tiffs of an image using the red, green and blue channels respectively. Using the blue channel image looks to have potential for producing some very "smooth" b+w images, the proof will be in the production of some prints to see if the extra work involved is worth the effort.

Barrie
 
Then you need to read up on ImageMagick and install it.

Which is what I just checked using the downloaded file - it will read the Merrill files OK.

It's a sophisticated program, and you can certainly extract a channel to make greyscales with it.

You probably need a combination of the -channel and -separate operators to do so
 
No idea.
But given that the whole raison d'etre of IM is to convert raw data, I'd guess that's what it's doing.

I only mess with it a bit to do my negative inversions when scanning film, and a few other minor tweaks, so you'll have to swing over to the IM site & forums to get more info.
 
Yes exactly. I know I can do it in SPP without too much fuss, but it'd still be a lot quicker to just run a command in a cmd window and have it extract from every X3F, and then import those to Lightroom.

I looked into it w/ spp 5 to c if I could write a script a long time ago, but from my preliminary look, it did not look like it could handle a cmd line input. If I have time and remember, I c if they changed anything in spp 6.

Gary
 
Thought you guys would like this B&W conversion (Sigma DP2M)

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[/url]Joe's Real BBQ by Lainey1, on Flickr[/IMG]
 
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