I'm going away for a year to India and want to start shooting RAW. Is anyone able to recommend any particularly good books on the subject. Or, as I'm very tight on my luggage allowance, are any of the DVD tutorials any good?
More generally on equipment I'm going to take a Lumix FZ50 and a Lumix LX2. I'm downloading onto a Macbook with Aperture2 and PS7. I will also have a backup hard drive. Any suggestions for anything else? ........................... but money is getting short!
Eddie,,,,,,Michael Reichmann has a series of downloadable tutorial videos on the use of Adobe Camera RAW that are very good. I feel the cost is reasonable for the quality of the content. http://www.luminous-landscape.com/
Each raw converter handles the image differently. Even with a single product, later versions offer richer feature sets and improved image quality and peformance than earlier ones. I know this does not address your question directly, but I am from the old school where you learn a piece of software by using it for a while. I have tried Adobe ACR, Bibble, Capture One, Nikon NEF converter, Raw Shooter - and each one is different - for example, ACR seems to recover blown highlight detail better than the others, Nikon's converter seems to be more "true to life" in its color rendition, Capture One's ( v3.7) offers the best workflow and batch processing making it the fastest and easiest to use, and so on. My advice would be to try the camera manufacturer's raw converter first, then do a little web research to understand what some of the features and benefits are of the other packages, with the understanding you already have gained from your experience with the mfgr's package as a reference point
On the practical side, all you really need to know is that in concept, shooting raw is a lot like shooting jpg with all image enhancements turned off or minimized. It is a little harder to lose information in the shadows or the highlights that might be caused by in-camera processing, and colors will almost always appear dull. The advantage is that it is harder to clip a very bright color, allowing you to adjust it more precisely in raw conversion or post processing. Think of it as a stick shift version of photo workflow. It is more time consuming, but you might be able to save some of those marginal images that either exceed the limitations of the camera sensor or were not exposed correctly. Some raw converters offer lens corrections and other useful tools to improve your images.
Be prepared to add storage space - you will need bigger memory cards, more hard drive space, etc to deal with the images that can be 3x-4x larger than jpg.
Discussion
5 repliesMore generally on equipment I'm going to take a Lumix FZ50 and a Lumix LX2. I'm downloading onto a Macbook with Aperture2 and PS7. I will also have a backup hard drive. Any suggestions for anything else? ........................... but money is getting short!
Each raw converter handles the image differently. Even with a single product, later versions offer richer feature sets and improved image quality and peformance than earlier ones. I know this does not address your question directly, but I am from the old school where you learn a piece of software by using it for a while. I have tried Adobe ACR, Bibble, Capture One, Nikon NEF converter, Raw Shooter - and each one is different - for example, ACR seems to recover blown highlight detail better than the others, Nikon's converter seems to be more "true to life" in its color rendition, Capture One's ( v3.7) offers the best workflow and batch processing making it the fastest and easiest to use, and so on. My advice would be to try the camera manufacturer's raw converter first, then do a little web research to understand what some of the features and benefits are of the other packages, with the understanding you already have gained from your experience with the mfgr's package as a reference point
On the practical side, all you really need to know is that in concept, shooting raw is a lot like shooting jpg with all image enhancements turned off or minimized. It is a little harder to lose information in the shadows or the highlights that might be caused by in-camera processing, and colors will almost always appear dull. The advantage is that it is harder to clip a very bright color, allowing you to adjust it more precisely in raw conversion or post processing. Think of it as a stick shift version of photo workflow. It is more time consuming, but you might be able to save some of those marginal images that either exceed the limitations of the camera sensor or were not exposed correctly. Some raw converters offer lens corrections and other useful tools to improve your images.
Be prepared to add storage space - you will need bigger memory cards, more hard drive space, etc to deal with the images that can be 3x-4x larger than jpg.
Hope this helps to get you started.
Sure. In most cases, Control-click on the link and select the appropriate Save command.