Post Processing - Blowing Up Your Images!
The pictures above are of Red Mountain (or also called Mount McDowell) was taken from my over look post in Adero Canyon. It is located on the Salt river Pima-Maricopa Indian Reservation in Mesa, Arizona. The mountain is highly protected, so getting physically close isn’t possible. As you will see, we could get very close using my Sony GMaster 70-200mm lens, just by cropping the 61 megapixel image from my Sony A7RV.
I will be traveling to attend a photography workshop of the Dolomites put on by Leonardo Papèra this October. I really love my 70-200mm lens, because it is sharp, it is light to carry, and it is easy to handle. When I took the pictures in the Alaska Portfolio I used a Sigma 150-600mm and that was exhausting after each day of shooting! When I am hiking up and down around the Dolomites I want my gear to be as light as possible as well as easy to use hand held too!
The big question? Would the 70-200mm lens be enough? If not, I could crop the image in camera as I was shooting, use a 2x teleconverter on my lens, and shoot in jpeg (not raw) so I could use Sony’s Clear Image Zoom. All of this would give me 6x image magnification equivalent to a 1,200mm lens. My problem with this is adding things to the camera lens, shooting without using the entire sensor area, compressing the image and not shooting in raw, has the potential of getting images that are soft and not tack sharp, the way I like them. Plus, it just makes the whole process of taking the picture more complicated and the potential to screw up and take a bad picture more likely. So, could I just crop the image in post production and capture geological features close up as if I had a much bigger zoom lens? The answer is YES. For proof, we will consider how close we can see detailed landscape features of this Red Mountain (and when we really look close there is a hint of wildlife…birds) by just cropping (and of course using AI in post production)!
Below is the original raw image out of the camera without any edits. I was over 3 miles away, standing high on a hill, with my camera setup on a tripod. I shot this at 200mm, f/4.5,1/125, ISO 100. Likely not the best settings I could have picked, but we will leave that discussion for a future blog post.
Before we even consider cropping to see how close we can zoom in on details, we have to clean this image up. The first thing I almost always do these days is to use the AI noise reduction tool within Lightroom. Besides removing noise it also applies Adobe’s Raw Details, meaning it sharpens the image. Then I used Lightroom’s AI masking tools to select the sky and make adjustment. Then mask the landscape and make it’s own unique adjustments (different than the sky) then apply additional adjustments including texture, de-haze, and a little more sharpening. Then a mild landscape preset was applied. The result is shown below…
Nice image! Now let’s crop. The first crop is the same image magnification result if I had used a 500mm lens. How does it look?
That should be the end of it, but, heck, let’s crop even more! So this next one is equivalent to a 1,600 mm lens! To me, that is a telescope!
Do you see the birds? Those small black objects near the top of the mountain, isn’t noise, it is wildlife! Even though this image is usable, and nice to look at, we are getting pretty close where the quality of the image is starting to break down. The edges, the color shading, are starting to become slightly abstract! It’s starting to drift into looking like a painting more than a picture taken from a camera. Having said that, this result is impressive, and this has convinced me I don’t need anything more than my 70-200mm zoom in the Dolomites for capturing far away features. The image above could be enlarged using Topaz Photo AI, if you wanted a very large print.
If you are wondering what would happen if I crop in even tighter, well this happens! This would be equivalent to a 15,000mm lens (and I think those are the types of things NASA sends into outer space).
Yup. It looks more like a painting than a picture taken by a camera! Even so, you can start to identify the nesting areas for the birds on the high cliff face.
My final word on this subject is this…it is always about light in photography. If you want detailed images of objects far away, if you have a very high quality sensor, and a really good camera with optics, that is all you need. Adding anything else or doing camera tricks will move you away from the result you want. Why? Because, it is all about light! Doing anything that reduces the light unnecessarily, such as in camera cropping or adding more glass like teleconverters, could adversely effect your image. If you don’t need those things then don’t use them. Keep it simple.
Having said all of this. I am going to purchase a 2x Sony Teleconverter and see what kind of images I produce! This will be a future blog post!
Jan Wegener’s Views on Teleconverters
Also for completeness, here is an exghaustive study of using the 70-200mm and 2x tele compared to the 100 to 400 GMaster. For me the advantages for the handling and convenience of one lens and a teleconverter, far outweigh the slight increase in color aberration at the corners and a very slight loss in sharpness.
Sony 100-400 Versus 70-200 with 2x Teleconverter
I wonder what would happen if…I crop images shot at 600mm equivalent!
