Posted by Darren White on June 6, 2006 at 11:41 PM
Turning to my PNW friends for this one!!!!
Up until a few days ago I have been shooting all my images on Jpeg high....but now Iam curious about Raw files...and if they are truly superior to Jpeg high files....I have numerous prints made at sizes of 16x24 and they are crystal clear with 3mb files....
I am wanting to move on to the next level but and kind of lost as far as working with Raw files....I have adobe CS2 and 7.0 but neither seen to give me the versitility I have with working with jpegs...
I may be overlooking something here so any help you can offer would be great and much appreciated...
thanks much
Darren
Posted by Zack Schnepf on June 7, 2006 at 12:13 AM
I am a firm believer in working in raw. The biggest advantage of raw to me is the greater control you have of your image. It's not any higher resolution or sharper, but you don't ever have to worry about white balance ever again. You choose your white balance in post processing. Also, exposure is much easier to compensate, you can push your exposure up to 2 stops and you can recover highlights a little better as well.
There are more advantages, but those are the highlights for me.
If you don't shoot RAW you are missing out on many important abilities in my opinion. You can do more finalization in the RAW converter before even creating the file and the resulting image will have less noise and/or break-ups in the continuity of the color spectrum.
One of the biggest advantages for me is often I'll create 2 files from the same RAW file (one over exposed and one normal exposed and then blend them together for better tonality) - I can end up with images that have a lot more dynamic range and are cleaner than if I manipulated a JPEG image.
Darren, open a RAW file in CS2 - you have curves, you have a detail page for editing the hue and saturation of R,G and B color spectrums. You have a wonderful crop tool and to the right of it is a ruler that if you draw a straight line anywhere in the image, then that is used to center your file and automatically crop it to match that as being level. If you hold down the Crop tool, you have presets for 2 x 3 (4 x 6 or 16 x 24) or 4 x 5 (8 x 10 or 16 x 20) and many other custom crop settings including custom settings.
Bottom line = your camera when it burns a JPEG image onto the card does a preset "curves" and "sharpness" and "color balance" to that image - these cripple the file - meaning that if you do additional processing, you will be degrading the image. RAW files don't have that automatic process done to them - a powerful computer with these killer applications will do much better job than the preset processes that your camera will do..... try for yourself. Shot the same scene in JPEG and RAW. Print each after processing each and see if you can tell a difference. I clearly can and never shoot JPEGs if the images have any value to me.
OH and finally. RAW converters will only get better and be able to possibly get more out of your RAW files. So the future has potential with RAW images - check out different RAW converters - they are each different and some seem better than others to many people. JPEGS are done - no possible future of getting them better than they are now.
There are really 2 things you give up when you go from JPEG to RAW. The first is space (RAW files are bigger). The second is shooting speed (RAW files are bigger and take longer to write, fill up your in-camera buffer more, etc). The second one was a real killer for me with the D-100.
Assuming you don't mind giving those up, RAW really opens up quite a few options. For starters, you can always drop back into your existing workflow by just using NikonView's JPEG converter. If you like what the camera's doing, you should get pretty much the same results as you usually do. Of course, you're not really getting any benefit out of RAW if you do that, but it's nice to know you're not really giving anything up (assuming you're not running out of space on your cards, waiting for it to be OK to take the next picture, or running out of hard drive space at home).
You really get 3 benefits. First of all, you can change your mind about the auto white balance, sharpening, saturation, etc settings. Second, you skip a JPEG compression step (which both adds a certain amount of smoothing and some noise at block boundaries). Third, you get the chance to use a tool like PhotoShop to control things like white balance, sharpening, etc. (I tend turn off sharpening, saturation adjustment, etc in the conversion because I'd rather have more control when I work an image and because it seems like those are things that should be done once rather than at several intermediate stages.)
I agree somewhat with the advice that you're liable to get better processing software later. Probably more importantly, your ability to process an image will improve with time and you're liable to want to revisit an photo you took recently. There's a good chance you'll wish you took that photo as a NEF rather than a JPEG. (Ok, I can't speak for you, but *I* which I'd switched to NEF from JPEG sooner than I did.)
If you're using Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) with CS2, get Bruce Fraser's book "Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS2". One of the best books on the subject.
Darren, not only all of that already mentioned but RAW will mix drinks for you, soothe you when your tired and make sure you wake up in time for any awesome sunrise!
It's THAT good!
Posted by Darren White on June 7, 2006 at 10:54 PM
Reply posted by Mark Hudon on 06/07/06 at 1:01 pm PDT
Darren, not only all of that already mentioned but RAW will mix drinks for you
---------------------------
because of this line alone......I am gonna give it another go around....
Posted by Darren White on June 8, 2006 at 10:08 PM
anyone else use Paint shop pro 9 or higher....
I just decieded to try it again and I am finding it much more user friendly then Adobe...now.....I love adobe for jpgs but for RAW and conversion....PSP seems sooo easy....I did buy the books Real world camera raw and Killer tips for CS2.....
Darren, get Photoshop Artistry by Barry Haynes. It'll give you everything you need to know about PS in nice bite size chunks. You will get Photoshop sooner or later and it might as well be sooner. Aside from that, we here talk the language of PS here at NPN. The sooner you tune into the language, the sooner you'll be using it to your advantage.
BTW, I don't know how old you are but your avatar makes it seems like you're not a teenager and maybe even have grandkids. If one of those kids is in school, you have a legitimate claim to an Academic version of CS2. You can get the whole suite for less than you would normally pay for Photoshop alone.
I open all of my RAW in Bridge. By draging the edges of the preview box a decent view can be had. The trash can will take care of those you do not want to keep. All photos taken at the same time and light can be selected and the first one opened in RAW. Changes made to the photo will also be made to all of the others you have selected. They can then be saved, or opened in CS2 for additional work. If you want to save them as JPEGs change the mode to 8 bit and save. It really goes pretty fast once you get the hang of it.
I use PSPX and the RawShooter to bring in raw files from my Canon D-Rebel. It seems to lag Photoshop by a year or so with new features (just added the ability to work with 16-bit images in version X for example), but I won't complain. Most articles I see written for Photoshop I can translate into similar tools in PSP, and most Photoshop plugins work as well. At some point I am likely going to outgrow it, and Photoshop is the gold standard. But I am such a rookie today, that I feel it is better if I am somewhat constrained in terms of software features.
To your original thread, make the move to raw format - for all the reasons already mentioned.
I do a lot of macro work and end up with a lot of junk shots. I hate using Adobe bridge on my PC, too slow. To quickly weed out the garbage I use a free program called FastStone MaxView. I can flip through the images at full screen size and either press DEL to trash or E to edit in Photoshop.
If size is a problem you can use Adobe's free DNG converter.
For Canon photos, I open the card like a hard drive and drag the .CRW files to a dated folder. THM files are thumbnails, you don't need them.
Discussion
13 repliesUp until a few days ago I have been shooting all my images on Jpeg high....but now Iam curious about Raw files...and if they are truly superior to Jpeg high files....I have numerous prints made at sizes of 16x24 and they are crystal clear with 3mb files....
I am wanting to move on to the next level but and kind of lost as far as working with Raw files....I have adobe CS2 and 7.0 but neither seen to give me the versitility I have with working with jpegs...
I may be overlooking something here so any help you can offer would be great and much appreciated...
thanks much
Darren
There are more advantages, but those are the highlights for me.
One of the biggest advantages for me is often I'll create 2 files from the same RAW file (one over exposed and one normal exposed and then blend them together for better tonality) - I can end up with images that have a lot more dynamic range and are cleaner than if I manipulated a JPEG image.
Darren, open a RAW file in CS2 - you have curves, you have a detail page for editing the hue and saturation of R,G and B color spectrums. You have a wonderful crop tool and to the right of it is a ruler that if you draw a straight line anywhere in the image, then that is used to center your file and automatically crop it to match that as being level. If you hold down the Crop tool, you have presets for 2 x 3 (4 x 6 or 16 x 24) or 4 x 5 (8 x 10 or 16 x 20) and many other custom crop settings including custom settings.
Bottom line = your camera when it burns a JPEG image onto the card does a preset "curves" and "sharpness" and "color balance" to that image - these cripple the file - meaning that if you do additional processing, you will be degrading the image. RAW files don't have that automatic process done to them - a powerful computer with these killer applications will do much better job than the preset processes that your camera will do..... try for yourself. Shot the same scene in JPEG and RAW. Print each after processing each and see if you can tell a difference. I clearly can and never shoot JPEGs if the images have any value to me.
OH and finally. RAW converters will only get better and be able to possibly get more out of your RAW files. So the future has potential with RAW images - check out different RAW converters - they are each different and some seem better than others to many people. JPEGS are done - no possible future of getting them better than they are now.
I'm going to bed now.
Assuming you don't mind giving those up, RAW really opens up quite a few options. For starters, you can always drop back into your existing workflow by just using NikonView's JPEG converter. If you like what the camera's doing, you should get pretty much the same results as you usually do. Of course, you're not really getting any benefit out of RAW if you do that, but it's nice to know you're not really giving anything up (assuming you're not running out of space on your cards, waiting for it to be OK to take the next picture, or running out of hard drive space at home).
You really get 3 benefits. First of all, you can change your mind about the auto white balance, sharpening, saturation, etc settings. Second, you skip a JPEG compression step (which both adds a certain amount of smoothing and some noise at block boundaries). Third, you get the chance to use a tool like PhotoShop to control things like white balance, sharpening, etc. (I tend turn off sharpening, saturation adjustment, etc in the conversion because I'd rather have more control when I work an image and because it seems like those are things that should be done once rather than at several intermediate stages.)
I agree somewhat with the advice that you're liable to get better processing software later. Probably more importantly, your ability to process an image will improve with time and you're liable to want to revisit an photo you took recently. There's a good chance you'll wish you took that photo as a NEF rather than a JPEG. (Ok, I can't speak for you, but *I* which I'd switched to NEF from JPEG sooner than I did.)
Of course, your mileage may vary.
Sean
RAW vs JPEG
It's THAT good!
Darren, not only all of that already mentioned but RAW will mix drinks for you
---------------------------
because of this line alone......I am gonna give it another go around....
I just decieded to try it again and I am finding it much more user friendly then Adobe...now.....I love adobe for jpgs but for RAW and conversion....PSP seems sooo easy....I did buy the books Real world camera raw and Killer tips for CS2.....
BTW, I don't know how old you are but your avatar makes it seems like you're not a teenager and maybe even have grandkids. If one of those kids is in school, you have a legitimate claim to an Academic version of CS2. You can get the whole suite for less than you would normally pay for Photoshop alone.
I use PSPX and the RawShooter to bring in raw files from my Canon D-Rebel. It seems to lag Photoshop by a year or so with new features (just added the ability to work with 16-bit images in version X for example), but I won't complain. Most articles I see written for Photoshop I can translate into similar tools in PSP, and most Photoshop plugins work as well. At some point I am likely going to outgrow it, and Photoshop is the gold standard. But I am such a rookie today, that I feel it is better if I am somewhat constrained in terms of software features.
To your original thread, make the move to raw format - for all the reasons already mentioned.
Best regards,
-Brett
I do a lot of macro work and end up with a lot of junk shots. I hate using Adobe bridge on my PC, too slow. To quickly weed out the garbage I use a free program called FastStone MaxView. I can flip through the images at full screen size and either press DEL to trash or E to edit in Photoshop.
If size is a problem you can use Adobe's free DNG converter.
For Canon photos, I open the card like a hard drive and drag the .CRW files to a dated folder. THM files are thumbnails, you don't need them.