Digital Photography: New Nikon D3S ISO 102,400

If you had Googled “ISO 102,400” toward the end of September you would have only found 2000 or so results. Not surprising really, after all, who would dream we could have a camera or film for that matter capable of producing images at such a high ISO?

By the time you read this column I’m pretty certain every one of you will be aware of the new Nikon D3S camera and its ability to shoot at ISO 102,400. No, that’s not a typo! I suspect if you were to Google the same phrase again there would be thousands of results.

This time around Nikon did a good job of keeping the lid on details, as there were very few rumors on the Internet even a few days before the official announcement. Judging by comments on photo forums it was probably because few believed a camera could be capable of such a high ISO.

Having seen a prototype of the D3S and some sample prints a few weeks prior to its launch date I can safely say it is true that the camera can produce images at ISO 102,400. Yes there is noise, but if you really need to capture a picture in bad lighting conditions the result is acceptable. Indeed, if you turn it into a black-and-white image, it is not much worse than the grain you would have gotten many years ago by pushing Kodak Tri-X film to ISO 1600. (I realize older folk will know exactly what this means, while younger photographers will likely not.)

In the samples I saw there is virtually no noise at ISO 12,800, which is the highest base ISO setting. At the H1 setting of ISO 25,600 there is still very little noise. Even at ISO 51,200 you have to get up close to a large print to see the noise. H3 is the setting for ISO 102,400.

When Nikon introduced the D3 two years ago, it shook up the photography world by showing clean images shot at ISO 6400. Now the D3S has literally doubled expectations by moving the needle up another two notches, or should we say, stops.

Apart from the significant increase in high ISO capabilities, the D3S is not a radical upgrade to the D3. It still sports a 12.1-megapixel FX-format CMOS sensor although an all-new design was required to deliver the higher ISO ratings. It also incorporates HD video (720p) with external audio capture and limited autofocusing capabilities.

From a photojournalist’s point of view the new D3S is obviously exciting news as its high ISO capabilities help tremendously. Nikon also likes to point out that this capability will also be a great boon to law enforcement agencies, which are  big customers of Nikon’s in the United States.

The D3S also supports a new 1.2X crop format that delivers 8-megapixel images. According to Nikon, this was a request from photojournalists. As before, the camera will accept DX lenses, which produce a 5-megapixel image with a 1.5X crop.

Based on the initial specs I am really looking forward to trying the D3S in person sometime in the near future and reporting back on its capabilities in real use.

Coming Soon in Photoshop
Every year the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) holds a couple of conferences, appropriately named Photoshop World, one on the East Coast and another on the West Coast. In the past few years I have managed to attend four or five gatherings including this year’s West Coast event, which was in Las Vegas at the beginning of October.

Although Photoshop World concentrates on Photoshop, it has not traditionally been aimed at photographers. Indeed, when I first attended one five years ago I came away slightly disappointed as a photographer because it seemed to be mainly directed at graphic artists.

This year, however, I found the whole event was far more closely aligned to addressing the needs of photographers. In fact some of the seminars and sessions were purely photographic with photographers, such as Joe McNally, Helene Glassman and Jim DiVitale demonstrating lighting and posing techniques. There was a whole track of sessions on Lightroom while other sessions described how to construct Web portfolios.

In all honesty I found some of the sessions to be fairly basic but was pleasantly surprised when a teacher in one class asked how many were attending for the first time and at least 50% of the audience raised their hands.

I took this as an encouraging sign as it shows that there are still plenty of new photographers who are eager to improve their digital skills. Photoshop World and WPPI, of course, are excellent venues to sharpen one’s skills.

During the keynote presentation at the start of Photoshop World, Russell Brown the well known Adobe Photoshop guru, demonstrated two new features that may be seen in the next version of Photoshop. The first was a new 3D brush set that allows painting with a realistic mixing of colors and a 3D effect, depending on the shape and angle of the brush used. It even changes color depending on the “drying” characteristics of the “paint” used.

The second demonstration he gave was of a warping tool where parts of an image can be moved to create animated clips. He demonstrated with a photo of Scott Kelby, the founder of Photoshop World, moving his arms by using parts from just one original photo. In effect, Brown was able to make a realistic animation from a single photo.

Right after Photoshop World, I attended Adobe MAX in Los Angeles. This is an annual conference for developers and designers who use Adobe products. About 3000–4000 people from all over the world attend it. Not being a developer or coder myself I expected to be intimidated by the keynote presentation and the classes. And I was in many instances! However, I was intrigued by several classes that were very much aimed at beginners. Judging by reactions to various announcements made during the two keynote addresses the audience was pretty much split 50/50 between developers and designers.

Adobe presenters got many digs in at Apple for not allowing Flash on the iPhone. Yet, despite this, the majority of presenters were using Mac laptops for their presentations. Indeed, by my estimation, more than half the attendees were using Macs in classes and it seemed that almost everyone had an iPhone.

The issue of Flash was a big topic of conversation. I even got the distinct feeling that there is some internal competition within Adobe between Acrobat engineers who feel a PDF is a better method of distribution than Flash. The main complaint of Flash is that it is a memory and CPU hog. According to Adobe the next 10.1 version of the Flash Reader will be much less of a resource hog.

In a sneak peek of the next version of Dreamweaver an engineer showed how the program will be able to grab website components and paste them in to a page to quickly create websites. Dreamweaver will also integrate nicely with HTML5, which will supposedly lessen the need to use Flash for media-rich websites.

During the widely anticipated Sneak Peeks show on the last night of the three-day convention, Adobe engineers demonstrated future projects that may or may not see the light of day. One project, code-named Rome, revealed a new program that would easily integrate Photoshop-type editing with website building capabilities by just dragging and dropping components. It generated plenty of “oohs” and “ahhs” from the audience.

One of the biggest applauses was given for yet another potential future Photoshop feature. This time an engineer demonstrated the content-aware healing brush. Essentially, he just ran a brush over a scratch or unwanted telephone cable on a picture and it immediately disappeared, while a new background was created that matched the adjoining one. It’s obviously a natural progression of the healing brush and the content-awareness tool used for stretching or shrinking photographs.

Adobe gave no hint as to when Photoshop CS5 will appear, but judging from prior history we can expect it sometime next spring. Based on what I saw at Photoshop World and Adobe MAX, I think it will be a more significant upgrade for photographers than the upgrade from CS3 to CS4.

Resizing Photographs in Batches
I am finding that as image sizes increase in every new DSLR, they are becoming unwieldy for many who have trouble opening them on their computers. Quite often I need to give copies of all images to a client, who is more often than not a model, immediately after a shoot so he or she can decide which ones are preferable. To do this I do not need full size hi-res images—one with dimensions of no more than 1200 pixels is often sufficient.
Just about every image-editing program will batch-process files to reduce them in size. But opening a full-function program such as Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture to perform this simple task is overkill and takes time.

If you search for image-resizing programs you’ll find dozens of low-cost programs just for this purpose as well as automator scripts for running on Mac OS X. I began to look at some of them but there are so many I quickly ran out of time, so could not try them all.

Two that caught my eye and I think may work well for my needs include ImageWell and EasyBatchPhoto. ImageWell is a program that performs resizing in batches and can also be set up to add a watermark. In addition it can add simple borders to saved images, making it ideal for posting images on a website. The program costs $19.95 and can be downloaded from www.xtralean.com.

EasyBatchPhoto is a program that works in a similar way. It sells for $23.95 and can be downloaded from www.yellowmug.com. The company also sells a companion program cleared EasyCrop, which, as its name suggests, goes a step farther as it allows for the cropping of images.

I plan to experiment with these and other programs in the next few months and hopefully I’ll report back in a future column with my favorite. While researching this, it got me thinking—wouldn’t it be great if smaller JPEG files could be created on-the-fly in a camera while shooting. It’s possible to save a RAW and JPEG file and it’s also possible to create smaller images, but you cannot currently save a full-size RAW image and a reduced size JPEG. I see no reason why this could not be done. How about it, Canon, Nikon, Olympus, et al?

John Rettie is a photojournalist who resides in Santa Barbara, CA. He has been using a camera as a professional for 39 years, a computer for 29 years and has combined his knowledge of both for the past 16 years. Readers can contact him directly by email at [email protected].