News about StudioFD, Frank Doorhof, and more.

Bye Bye Dropbox old friend….

/in , /by

Well ok that’s a bit over the top, we will still be using dropbox but in one move dropbox actually became unusable for us and I think many others. Now let me make one thing clear…. money has to be made, and I get it, but this is I think a huge mistake from dropbox.

So what happened?
The last two weeks I’ve hardly been online, out with the flu and still recovering (it’s a nasty one), so I did miss something apparently. Dropbox free changed their policy to allowing only 3 connected devices….. THREE!!!! are you kidding me?

Ok that was my first reaction, and second and third….
If you want more, the option is paying $9.00 a month for 1TB.
That’s more than we pay for Netflix to put in perspective.

So ok I get it, you have to earn money, but let me explain why I think this is very wrong from Dropbox and will essentially hurt them a lot. We have been Dropbox users since…. well I think almost forever. We’ve brought in a lot of friends so we have a rather large space online, but even that is actually for today’s standards not that impressive app 70GB.

We use Dropbox for the syncing of files between our devices.
I have my presets on there so that on whatever device I work I have the same presets, we have some documents on there that we always seem to need, and we simply use it to store files that I need for my laptop at home while working in the studio. So we are not “heavy” users.

So if Dropbox would limit storage to 25GB we could live with that.
If Dropbox would limit the daily download limit to let’s say 10GB I can live with that too.

And these are also the things that actually cost money. Data traffic is not free, data storage is not free, so yeah I get it, of course it’s not fun, but I understand that maybe to a free plan there are some limitations…. but what did Dropbox do….. limit the amount of devices to three. Now why is this stupid?

Let’s only look at myself.
1. Studio PC
2. Laptop at home
3. Phone
4. Tablet

On all these devices I use the same dropbox account, so now I have to let one go… well ok that’s doable, however Annewiek and I work together, so for us it’s actually.

1. Studio PC
2. Laptop at home
3. Phone
4. Tablet
5. Annewiek’s phone
6. Annewiek’s laptop
7. Annewiek’s tablet

So we use 7 devices connected to dropbox.
Which from now on….. will not work anymore……so we have to decide which ones have to go.
I really need the link between my Studio PC and Laptop, and Annewieks laptop and that would actually be it, but I also want to be able to connect via my phone or tablet to share some images to social media, well that’s not possible anymore.

Now again this is not nagging that something should remain free, again I get it, you have to make money. However limiting the amount of connected devices is a very weird move in my opinion, we live in a world where everything gets connected, our sat receiver for example has settings that are stored on dropbox, you can connect your gameconsole to dropbox etc. etc. in other words, in a modern household 3 devices to dropbox doesn’t cut it. Of course you can create more accounts… but that doesn’t make it easier and good to work with.

Now why will this hurt Dropbox in the future
When you use something and you love it and you run into limitations the change of upgrading is there, because you already have everything on that platform and it works. What Dropbox is doing now is limiting the amount of connected devices to only 3, if you are looking for a new online storage solution the market is overflown with options, some cheaper, some free, some more expensive, but there is a huge amount of choices, meaning the chance that someone STARTS with Dropbox is now limited, meaning that if less people use it, less people will upgrade, especially seeing the alternatives.

Alternatives
Take for example OneDrive
We have 1 TB storage online because we use Office 365 and this is 1TB for every user (max 6).
It’s not less usable than Dropbox,so why not just use that?
And it’s a lot cheaper because for $9.99 a month you also get the whole office 365 suite (sweet)
At this point we already have much more benefits by using one drive compared to dropbox
Although that’s not completely true. Dropbox excels that it works on all platforms, but let’s be honest in our household there is a mix of Apple, Android and Windows and MacOS, and all those systems OneDrive works fine.

There’s also still Apple with 50GB for 0.99$
There’s also Google Drive with 19.99$ a year for 100GB
And of course PCloud which also has a free version
Box is also often mentioned but they have an upload limit per file, which can be frustrating with today’s file sizes.

In other words there are a LOT of alternatives that are essentially cheaper although often giving less space, but let’s be honest how much online space do you really need? for us as a studio 10-15GB is enough and I guess for most people it is. When I discuss this with people I always make the joke, it’s 10-20GB or unlimited, nothing in between. Meaning for what we do we would not need more than 10-20GB, but if we want to backup and store stuff we would need a LOT more.

Conclusion
We love Dropbox, it works, it’s stable, it’s fast, it’s very handy, but limiting it’s free service to 3 devices is something that doesn’t work for us, and in all honesty the monthly fee is just too high seeing the alternatives, and the fact of course that for a long time there was no limit to the connected devices. We never really used OneDrive because we used Dropbox, at the moment we are switching everything over to OneDrive.

Something to think about.
I know a lot of you guys out there will think “come on Frank, can’t you afford a measly $8.99 a month?”
Well it’s not that in reality, it’s however 9.00 here, 10.00 there, 12.00 there, and before you know it you spend a large amount of your income per month to subscriptions.

Now I love Creative Cloud, so that’s a no brainer (and it’s cheap)
I also love Netflix which is relatively cheap.
But it doesn’t stop there, in the future Disney is starting and taking away the Marvel series, meaning we also have to pay Disney, YouTube is getting more and more annoying with the constant nags about YouTube Red so at one point they will probably cripple their own platform to a point that people will leave or also take the Red subscription. And of course you want to be able to play a game, so you need a PS4 subscription, and of course Spotify, and in the states you of course want Amazon Prime… it REALLY starts to add up compared to let’s say 10 years ago.

And yeah it sounds like not a lot of money, but adding it to the pile really will make a difference for a lot of households and I think a lot of people can’t really afford 10.00$ a month extra.

So in short, I would prefer Dropbox to limit downloads or uploads or storage, but not connected devices.
What’s your opinion?

Solving the P30 Pro color problems

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Let me start out by saying that I’m horrified by the fact that no-one saw this in reviews. It goes without saying that I always have my doubts with reviewers that review smartphones for photography. I strongly have the opinion that those reviewers hardly take any time to shoot serious stuff with the cameras, maybe it’s because of time constraints or it’s simply because they don’t know about DNG.

Long story short (because I could really rant about this), it’s the reviewers we trust, they often get cameras or other devices before the general public and let’s be honest we often determine our spending on their advice. In the past reviews with the P20 Pro I already had my doubts because according to most reviews the images were not more than ok, and only slightly above for example Samsung and Apple….. from the start I suspected them to use the P20Pro on JPG and 10MP because when I shot the P20Pro I was over the moon with the DNG/RAW files on 40MP, but the 10MP JPGs…… mawh not that much, over processed and not color accurate, actually exactly what the reviewers said. Now when you bring a phone like the P20Pro and now the P30Pro on the market aimed so strongly at photographers I really and I mean REALLY can’t figure out why they don’t give the cameras to real photographers that do real work with it. As soon as the P30Pro was announced I was ready, ready to be amazed, come on this is Huawei a brand 2 years ago I would not think about buying but ever since the P20Pro I’ve been a Huawei fanboy, and no I’m NOT affiliated with them, I paid full retail for my phone and they didn’t even a funky color so I ended up with black.

My p30Pro arrived and I couldn’t wait to test it out, to my horror this was not what I expected, images were horrendous. Not in sharpness or noise, not on JPG those rock, and even the video is A LOT better, but my beloved DNG/RAW files on 40MP with all due respect I have no other name for it than…. not accurate at all, not by a mile. At that point also my frustration started to build, all those reviews, all those people that have millions of views and claim to be professionals in their trade…. is it my device? is it me? so i started asking around online, now not a lot of people owned the P30Pro but the once that did to my surprise ALL confirmed that reds were indeed funky, and trust me it’s not just the reds.

Ok so what’s going on?

In essence it’s not that hard to figure out.
The P30Pro is using a new sensor, let’s keep it simple.
A normal sensor captures RGB (often in a Bayer pattern), but this new sensor captures RYYB, meaning not Red, Green and Blue but Red, Yellow, Yellow, Blue. In essence this means more light capture but it also brings a problem. In a balanced colorspace we work with a blackbody curve on which our white point sits (often revered as D65, or 65K or 6500) When you draw a line through these points you end up with a balanced system where Red connects with Cyan, Blue connects with Yellow and Green connects with Magenta. let’s visualize this, this is a REC709 colorspace rendered in 2D. Just ignore the dots, it’s a report from one of my ISF calibrations.

As you can see, the primaries colors are RGB and the secondary colors are CMY.
Normally a colorspace is 3 dimensional. This means that every color has a fixed coordinate, for red REC 709 for example this is

RGB color space parameters[2]
Color space White point Primaries
xW yW xR yR xG yG xB yB
ITU-R BT.709 0.3127 0.3290 0.64 0.33 0.30 0.60 0.15 0.06

And this goes for everything. So Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB, REC709, BT2020, P3 etc. all colorspaces that have fixed coordinates for the colors, this way we always know where the colors should be. Now we can manipulate these colors actually pretty simple. Because it’s a 3 Dimensional colorspace we use the so called HSL settings to get the colors in their position. (Hue, Saturation, Luminance) Now this is not the complete story, because there is also something called Gamma but let’s keep it “simple” for now.

Ok so the first images I took with the P30 Pro looked like this.
First the RAW file without any adjustments and after that the JPG and although the JPG is slightly over saturated it’s actually pretty accurate, that thing is really really red.

Ok so you don’t have to be a genius to see that this is not right, and again I really can’t understand why no “professional”  reviewer did not see this.
In essence what’s probably going wrong is that by creating green out of the yellow they shift red towards orange (which is what you see) however when you look closely you see that also blues and cyans are affected, which is to be expected seeing a colorspace is a “balance” thing, if the balance is not 100% ALL colors shift.

Now this got me thinking.
Some people said it must be a problem with the sensor, but that doesn’t make any sense at all. Think about it, the RAW file is captured, and from there the JPG is created, not the other way around, so why would the RAW file be wrong and the JPG correct. The weird thing however is that both in the native app on the P30Pro as in Lightroom CC as in Capture One the P30Pro files just are wrong.

At first of course you panic and you think the worst.
But let’s be honest, what is the first thing I learn you guys when you visit my channel/workshops etc.?
right always calibrate your screen and use the colorcheckers. So I decided to do the same thing but now with my P30Pro.

This is shot with the Xrite colorchecker SG
This is a really nice colorchecker with plenty of patches so you can create nice smooth correction files.

Now this is a HUGE mess, reds, skintones, blues… well let’s be fair almost every color is totally wrong, and not for a small amount.
Luckily Xrite delivers some really nice software to create custom profiles. And it’s not hard, just export from Lightroom, or Capture One and the software does it’s magic. And indeed… voila.
same Raw file

And there we go, now this is something I recognize.

So what do we do?
Well until Huawei somehow fixes their RAW/DNG files (and that shouldn’t be hard seeing it’s only a wrong profiling) you will have to use a separate profile for your DNGs. And again its really easy to build and in all honesty if you’re serious about photography you probably already own a colorchecker.

So is this it?
no I wish, there still is a huge problem for P30Pro owners. Although the files are not lost and you can easily correct them you do have to realize that this is a problem that is very serious, all the apps on your phone that are able to work with RAW files like for example Snapseed, Lightroom CC etc. will all suffer from problems when you open the files directly, meaning editing the RAWs on your phone is NOT possible (if you want accurate colors), so Huawei really has to change this in software and create a proper ICC profile for their DNG files. Luckily this is solvable with software, it’s simply put creating a correct correction file and it’s done. So let’s hope that this maybe helps a bit.

Now what do I think of the phone?
It’s awesome. Love the new screen and look, it’s blazingly fast, it’s even able to decode 1080P .ts streams on the fly to cast to chromecast without any hickups, video looks really nice and smooth in 4K and stunning stabilization in 1080. Fingerprint sensor just works and the camera…. oh man really don’t start about the cameras.

Having a wide angle, standard and 5-10x zoom is just plain awesome.
I would love to have the wide and standard on 40MP but let’s be honest 20MP wide and 40MP is pretty cool too. Oh and the selfie camera is also great (finally)

Just fix the colors on your main MAJOR selling point sensor.
Oh and next time…. maybe first send a device to people that know how to shoot RAW 🙂 (hint hint)

As always feel free to leave comments below. I’ll post some images soon which I took with the camera, but trust me…. run to the store and get one.

P30 pro huge camera problem

/1 Comment/in , , /by

After the huge quality jump from any other smartphone I ever used with the p20 pro I was more than excited to get my new p30 pro

because I mainly upgrade for the camera I ofcourse immediately tested out the camera and to my surprise the result is incredibly disappointing to a point where I think this is a bug

Here you see the jpg in 40mp

Although pretty over saturated it’s pretty accurate, the red is very bright in real life

And here is the same scene from the raw???

The weird thing is that with super wide I don’t see this problem.

Anyone else experiencing this?

Btw I’m not panicking yet seeing the jpg is fine I think there is a raw issue inside the firmware. Maybe due to the new rgy sensor instead of the usual rgb.

So let’s hope they fix this because now it’s totally unusable.

Did some more tests

It seems to only happen on the 40mp raw setting. Any other setting seems to be ok. Also the wide-angle sensor seems ok. I don’t know if they use the new RYB sensor only for the full frame but that could explain it.

Overall I still think it can be solved with a firmware fix seeing the jpg is derived from the raw and the jpg is fine.

What I do find very curious is that I can’t find any review online taking about this. On the other hand it seems they only tested jpg. Which I never understood. The power of these cameras is in the raw

So could someone test this please in raw 40mp mode?

So excited about this.

/in , /by

Can’t help myself
So excited about this
https://www.technobuffalo.com/huawei-p30-pro-periscope-zoom

Let’s be honest I shoot a lot of images on my phone and since the p20 pro for the first time ever I’m totally satisfied with my images in good light and happy in challenging conditions.

The night mode is pure magic.

Now when you see what they are going to do with the p30 pro is just cool. 10x zoom and nightmode without software ?? That would be insane.

Also look at the video option where you can see the wide angle shot and tele so it’s easier to frame shots with for example fast moving subjects.

Can’t wait.
What is your take on these kind of cameras that can make phonecalls ?
It will not replace my main camera but I’m now more than happy to leave home without my camera. Because I know my phone can get it pretty much right.