Bought K100D now questions

[dingdongbubble]

Hi

I bought the Pentax K100D finally a few weeks ago. I ahve been playing around with it and am pleased with it. I do hae a few questions about it though:

When i use Auto White Balance, and shoot in yellow light, the results are POOR, worse than my cheap, battered up, old Kodak P/S. What hsuld I do when I want to use the tungsten white balance in auto pict mode?

How do I use the auto bracket feature and what exactly is it? i found it by pressing Fn and then up and choosing it from the shooting modes menu.

Will it make a difference if i use Shake Reduction on a tripod?

 

[eji]

I have the same white balance slip-ups on my K10D. Sometimes "automatic" doesn't always mean "correct," I guess. So when you're shooting in tungsten or indoor yellow-ish light, just set the white balance manually. It's easy enough: just three thumb clicks.

As for the shake reduction, I've always been told that you should turn off shake reduction before taking tripod-assisted photos. I don't know why, since shake reduction should automatically make no compensation for a stable shooting environment -- but we might have another "automatic" isn't "correct" issue again.

Auto bracketing is explained here. I've used it for HDR photos.

 

[dingdongbubble]

Thanks

how do i merge the photos then?

in auto pict mode, i cant change the awb. any suggestions?

 

[Abstract]

I have the same white balance slip-ups on my K10D. Sometimes "automatic" doesn't always mean "correct," I guess. So when you're shooting in tungsten or indoor yellow-ish light, just set the white balance manually. It's easy enough: just three thumb clicks.

All Auto WB is crap. All of it. The new Nikon D300's Auto WB seems like a progressive step forward, but with every other DSLR on the market, the Auto WB under tungsten light is horrid. Canons are supposed to be particularly bad at WB in tungsten light, but I don't know how much better/worse Pentax does in comparison.

 

[dingdongbubble]

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So i always use manual? Even the evaluative 1 where it takes a pic and then sets a white balance didnt work in tungsten lite properly wen i used it.

 

[robbieduncan]

Just shoot RAW and correct it later. That's what I do with my Canon and it works fine...

 

[eji]

Yes, with WB, it's probably best to stick with manual. The wasted shot you get when you've forgotten to change settings (i.e., shooting "Tungsten" when your K100D is set to "Daylight") is equivalent to the wasted shot you get when the auto WB doesn't work properly, so it all evens out. Or, like RobbieDuncan said, use something like Raw Photo Processor (it's free) and adjust the WB afterwards.

You say you can't change WB when the K100D is in "auto pict" (?) mode? I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here, but keeping your camera on "auto" or "green" mode is kind of a waste of a D-SLR.

And what do you mean by merging photos? You mean stitching them together to create a panorama? If so, try something like DoubleTake.

 

[SLC Flyfishing]

I also shoot Pentax and yes, the auto white balance is not good. Like was said earlier, just shoot RAW and correct it in post processing; you will get much better results that way anyway. What program do you use for photo-editing?

The Advantages to RAW are many, first you can change the white balance after the fact in your post processing, the camera may apply one to the image and it may look bad, but when you go to edit it you can change the color temperature as much as you like to get it right and it won't affect the image quality like it would if your tried to edit a jpeg in this way. You also have the ability to make a host of other corrections, all nondestructively.

As far as using shake reduction on a tripod, the reason you are supposed to switch it off for tripod work is that it sets up a feedback loop. Somehow, having the shake reduction on while the camera is mounted to a tripod can actually trick the camera into trying to compensate for shake that isn't there, and you can get a blurry photo. Tripods are the best shake reduction money can buy, so you aren't missing out on a thing by switching the camera's SR off while using a tripod.

The bracket feature is a feature that allows you to program the camera to take an image with a few different exposures, it is designed to allow you to make sure you've got the best chance for success. You can tell the camera how many images you want it to take, and how many stops you want it to space each exposure by. Then you have to press the shutter that many times for each image you want to capture since it's going to give you that many variants. Use it when you have a still life or a landscape that you really want to nail. It is also useful for HDR photography, since you can get multiple captures of the same image with differing levels of shadow and highlight detail.

Hope that helps, and it appears that there are a lot of other Pentaxians on here so ask away when other questions arise and we'll be glad to help out.

SLC

 

[creator2456]

I have a K10D and as others have said already, the Auto WB is not worth using unless you want that effect.

The auto bracket is just a shortcut to getting multiple exposures without manually changing the settings. Just set the # of exposures and the difference in f-stop then just hold the shutter release and it will expose with your settings (at least the K10D allows the user to just hold down the shutter)

As with the shake reduction, it has been explained pretty well already too. I almost never use it because I forget to turn it off after I'm done with it.

 

[dingdongbubble]

I am sorry to ask so many questions but cna you suggest an easy to use free software for HDRI? So that I can take like three photos and then mix them together so to seak and get a picture like on wikipedia's page on HDRI.

How can i change the number of pictures in a bracketed burst?

 

[eji]

Search MacUpdate for HDR and you get something like this. Unfortunately, most good HDRI apps (like Photomatix) aren't freeware.

Didn't your K100D come with a manual? You might want to try giving that a read before you ask questions about changing the auto bracket burst.

Google and ye shall find. Work and ye shall prosper.