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Comment by willyt | Hacker News Reader

Why not show the result in real time as you adjust the sliders? You can still show the preview off to one side or whatever. It would help develop a tighter iterative loop for experimenting and save the cognitive overhead of trying to remember what was wrong with the one before. Have some image 'troughs' which you can populate with screen grabs including the settings you used to allow quick reference to settings from previous results. If you did that then there would be more of an argument for using this rather than just picking up a DSLR and fiddling with the controls.

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I agree, that actually surprised me a bit. With a real SLR, some adjustments are immediately obvious. When you change the aperture, the view becomes brighter/dimmer and the depth of field changes.

Some, like shutter speed, don't make a difference until you hit the button, but it would have been nice to see the DOF changes in real time.

Still, a great little tool. Very handy.

On most DSLRs, I believe, you have to press a DOF-preview button (whatever it's called), instead, it remains wide open making it easier/possible to accurately focus using the viewfinder. Focus is what I miss most in this simulator, it leaves out a very important part of taking of the picture…

And of course, there is virtually no way to reflect the ISO or shutter speed setting, using the optical viewfinder. Not a bad idea to "simulate" here as well, because it's not funny to shoot in the aperture-first mode and forget to reset ISO from some ridiculously high value that you had to use yesterday in the evening.

That's right, I remember that button. Good catch.

On the other hand, I was confused and disappointed that the lighting slider in the simulation doesn't do anything (well, it shows an icon, for a while, couldn't it just dim/lighten the scene a bit?).

On most modern (D)SLRs the lens isn't stopped down to the aperture setting until the shutter button is depressed (or you activate the DOF-preview button if it's available). Even when the lens is stopped-down to the aperture you've set, the in-viewfinder effect is far subtler than it ends up being in the actual exposure.

Many cameras (including mine) do not have an LCD that accurately reflects shutter speed or ISO settings.

> You can still show the preview off to one side or whatever. It would help develop a tighter iterative loop for experimenting and save the cognitive overhead of trying to remember what was wrong with the one before.

ITYM, "Why doesn't this SLR camera have burst mode?"

willyt, the Mac/Windows version of this sim lets you see the effects of ISO, f-stop, and all those other "post-snap" adjustments in real time.

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