First Pics With D50

drakeman · Sep 21, 2008

C&C welcome. I have been searching for a camera awhile now and I just got a great deal on a d50. I picked up a Nikon AF 50mm 1.8 lens yesterday so I could start shooting. I plan on purchasing a Sigma 70-200 2.8 as soon as I can find a deal on one for the action shots I am planning on taking.

I'm having trouble getting my edited pictures out of Aperture. When I export them they are loosing a TON of quality. I tried changing the format and such, but I cannot get it to work. I finally decided just to drag the images to my desktop, but I till am loosing image quality. (They just do not look as sharp.) Any Mac users that can help with this?

Anyways:
1. Took this downtown right after I got the lens.

2. This one was kind of random of my dad. He just got back from work and had a funny expression so I captured it.

3. These are of my dog Berkley. It was a gloomy day and he seemed to not like it after all of the sunny weather we have been having. He had sad expressions.

4. Now that I look at this it seems he is blending into the background too much. It wasn't this bad before I took it out of Aperture.

5.

iPwnF00lz · Sep 21, 2008

I like #1, the bmw looks niceeeeee.

srt86hil · Sep 21, 2008

I think #1 might benefit from being in landscape so that the car has space to hypothetically drive into. The photos of your dog are the kind of thing that come up every single day in this forum, but I like the colours of yours a lot, and I think you've got them really nice and contrasty.

andrew99 · Sep 21, 2008

I think the 50 f1.8 should look sharper, although I see you are using large apertures (f1.8, f2.2, etc), which gives a very shallow DOF... also could be you are not focusing on the dogs eyes. Are you shooting in RAW or JPG?

drakeman · Sep 21, 2008

Ya I was shooting in jpeg which might have been the mistake. But the thing is these all looked a lot sharper in aperture, then as soon as I dragged them to my desktop they lost a lot of their quality. It was worse when I tried to export them. Shooting in raw would not make a difference when I actually export them right?

drakeman · Sep 22, 2008

Anybody know?

andrew99 · Sep 23, 2008

The reason I asked jpeg or raw is because with raw, you have to do all the sharpening and adjustments manually on the computer. Since you are shooting in jpg, the camera is applying some sharpening/saturation/contrast adjustments depending on what settings you chose in the cameras menu. Also, if you were shooting raw, you might have a problem with your raw converter. But since you're shooting jpeg, these problems don't apply and your workflow is simpler. Since they look good in aperture, I don't know what the problem could be... I'm not a mac user, so I can't help with that... But are you saving them in aperture? I don't understand the "drag them to my desktop" comment.

drakeman · Sep 24, 2008

Alright well in aperture you don't really save the images, (from my understanding) you export them in the settings you choose. So I tried just doing the normal export to a jpeg file, (so it is just like choosing the format to save in with pc) but when I opened the file from its saved location the image quality was terrible. I tried again exporting the picture with adjusted settings. I bumped up the image quality on the slider bar to max, then exported again. It was still pretty bad (soft) when I pulled up the images side by side, one in aperture, and the exported file. So next I just made aperture window small (so it does not take up my whole desktop) and just dragged the picture I was editing to the desktop. This created a little file on the desktop window. I pulled this side to side and it was closer, but still soft. So this was the file I ended up uploading to the forum. It lost no quality putting it on to the forum. Only when I exported the picture from aperture is when it lost quality.
Sorry for the ramble, maybe some one has experienced this before.....

DannyB · Sep 24, 2008

Wow nice shots! I too have a D50 but I am sure looking into the Nikon 50mm 1.8 as I have heard many great things about them. I was hoping to come across another D50 user with this lens so I could see the result. So much more crisp than anything I can get with what I have. Thanks for sharing!