First Attempt With Pentax Pixel Shift

[smoke665]

I've delayed trying this, because I wasn't sure of all the hype. Had a little time to kill today, so I did a quick set up on the table. Other than the lighting being off, and the over saturation in the red (partly because of the lighting), I think these show some of the difference in a "in camera" HDR, and one shot with Pixel Shift. Still have a lot to learn with it, but think it shows promise. With something other than the kit lens, I think the detail will be significant.

The first one is a "in camera" HDR

The second was shot using the Pentax Pixel Shift

 

[pixmedic]

much cool.
so colors.

 

[robbins.photo]

Very nifty. When you get a chance if you could test it on a moving target, that would be really interesting. I'm curious to see how it handles something that is in motion. Not like super fast jet speeds mind you, but say more for candid shots.

 

[smoke665]

Very nifty. When you get a chance if you could test it on a moving target, that would be really interesting. I'm curious to see how it handles something that is in motion. Not like super fast jet speeds mind you, but say more for candid shots.

From what I've read and seen, it doesn't play nice with much movement in the subject or the camera. Air movement from an A/C vent caused the the petals to move ever so slightly, then the washer kicked on spin cycle, causing just enough shake in the floor that the tripod moved slightly. In both cases the sharpness suffered. In simple terms think of trying to capture a 4 image HDR of a moving subject.

On a single image, a 24 megapixel sensor using a Bayer Pattern outputs full color images with each of the 24 megapixels containing red, green, and blue color values. 12 million pixels are sensitive to green light, 6 million are sensitive to red, and 6 million are sensitive to blue. No other color data beyond this is recorded by the sensor at the time of image capture. The camera restores all the missing color information by making a mathematical guess based on the data found in neighboring pixels. There is no optimal algorithm, so Bayer Pattern sensors always suffer from a slight loss of detail when reproducing an object, especially near edges, where pixel boundaries play a key role.

Pixel Shift increases the amount of color data recorded by microscopically shifting pixels around at the time of image capture (up, down, left, and right by one pixel relative to the default sensor position) so that each pixel gets fully exposed to all three color channels across a series of four images. So any movement while the 4 images are being captured is going to degrade the image. The process effectively quadruples the number of red/blue pixels and doubles the number of green pixels, increasing the overall level of recoverable detail in the final processed image.

 

[robbins.photo]

From what I've read and seen, it doesn't play nice with much movement in the subject or the camera. Air movement from an A/C vent caused the the petals to move ever so slightly, then the washer kicked on spin cycle, causing just enough shake in the floor that the tripod moved slightly. In both cases the sharpness suffered. In simple terms think of trying to capture a 4 image HDR of a moving subject.

Ahh, crap. I was kind of hoping that what I read already might have been a bit exaggerated, but it sounds like that's not the case. Oh well. Sounds like fantastic tech, who knows maybe someday....

 

[smoke665]

Red has always been my nemesis, so why not start of my experimenting with Red? Apparently PSP8 doesn't really play well with Pixel shift either. I reprocessed the image through the Pentax Utility software then saved as TIFF. Imported into PSP8 resized and converted to JPEG. Doing so seemed to bring out more midtones especially in the Red.