a7S RAW stills settings

Viscount Omega

Viscount Omega

Carbonite Member
A friend of mine asked me to do some family portrait stills for him in a few days with his wife and daughter. I have almost no experience with stills so I thought I would ask here.

This afternoon I was playing around and came up with...

My usual slog-2 setting with ND filters, white balance preset on site (it's going to be exterior daytime), Program Mode. I guess I'll use the RAW + jpeg setting.
In video mode I usually expose 1.5 stops to the right but in stills mode it looks like that's not necessary (?). A light bulb in my room looks exposed the same as normal in stills mode as 1.5 over in video mode.

He wants to do the software processing himself so I just have to do the shooting and deliver the files.

Any tips you guys know of?

Thanks.
 
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You likely won't need to overexpose when shooting raw like you have been shooting slog2 in video. Raw contains so much information it doesn't suffer from the same issues the compressed video does. Personally I usually set a picture profile to neutral when shooting stills because nothing is baked in anyways (with raw) and it gives a pretty great image out of the box.
 
If I use a picture profile like neutral, doesn't that limit the dynamic range captured? I'm looking at RAW test shots using Sony's Image Data Converter and I don't see a way to get slog-2 dynamic range from an image captured with a profile like neutral. Maybe different software can do it?

Edit: I just took some more s-log2 RAW shots and I'm seeing lots of hideous green artifacts and washes of green. I reset the profile and checked white balance and everything but it's still there. Not sure what's causing it. It's not there in video mode.
 
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raw will give you more DR and it will be much more usable than slog2. raw is raw, its just the data from the sensor, there is no look baked in. it will appear to have less dynamic range than with slog2 because slog2 is flat. but if you edit in photoshop (or any raw-capable photo editor) all of the info is there.
 
Standard pic profiles only impact jpegs and the preview on the camera, raws are unaffected. I wouldn't shoot stills with slog and it's exposure needs. If you're delivering raws I'd just use standard or warm things up with Autumn Leaves so the previews on the rear LCD look nice. I'd also frame as tight as needed in cam as 12 mp doesn't leave a lot of room to crop. The awesome DR of the A7s renders people really nice IMO.

Lightroom or any other raw converter will give you better results than Sony's software, download a trial version and push the shadow and highlight sliders around, you'll be amazed, more DR than any video shot with slog.
 
I'd also advise to set the camera to a standard gamma (anything that is not s-log) in order to get the proper exposure for RAW stills. Shooting stills while in slog2 has made me underexpose and get too much noise in the past.
 
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