notice the white balance, brightness, and exposure... [This attachment has been purged. Older attachments are purged from time to time to conserve disk space. Please feel free to repost your image.]
I keep resisting shooting in raw, because of the size, but you and roger are really forcing me to consider it. I may have to try it.
Tim and Roger pretty much have me converted. I just need to figure out how to adjust the pictures and not make them worse
the magic is in the subtlety. can't get too aggressive. source material is important also. garbage in...
Now if they could ever make a photo editing package that was smart enough to let you focus/unfocus in post production, that would be awesome
i seem to recall hearing something about that sometime back. no idea how it could work but then again.....
here is another example of a RAW save... i know it isnt very sharp but thats not the point here... [This attachment has been purged. Older attachments are purged from time to time to conserve disk space. Please feel free to repost your image.]
If they ever perfected it, the day of the perfect shot being ruined by minor focusing issues would be gone
Well Ray, the advantage is that (usually) the RAW converter doesn't touch your original file, so if you make it worse....well, it's easy to reset.
I'm just not good at adjusting the settings on the RAW image. The power may be there, but I don't have the ability to adequately use the flexibility that it gives me. I have difficulty judging subtleties of exposure and color, and RAW adjustment is all about the subtlety. I still mostly shoot jpeg, using RAW either when the subject is more important to me (like when I'm shooting my beloved snow leopards) or when the conditions are more difficult and I expect to need the extra latitude, like the clouded leopard in the dark enclosure or a bright white polar bear cub in bright sunlight. The thing is that because I have difficulty with RAW I tend to work with RAW images less. I know you're thinking that I need to use them more to get familiar with the process but it really isn't happening, my difficulty with subtleties like this pre-date my ever picking up a digital camera, I had the same difficulties with film and a real chemical laden darkroom.
Dan, what converter are you using, i threw away the canon software that came with each of my cameras in favor of a 3rd party called breezebrowser, pretty good tutorial, and you can preview each effect in a larger view before converting they also offer a program called downloader pro, i have it set up to open when i put a card into my reader, then i start it downloading, i have it set up so it downloads to one of my hardrives, which i keep seperate from mthe drive i put the converted images on, i have it set so it puts all the images into folders seperated by date, very good for me when i come back from a trip with a lot of images from different places, so i can process and upload to my image gallery all of a particular day at a time i find the breezebrowser converter works very well, i can set exposure compensation in very small increments, ie, 0.2 it didn't take a long time to get the feel for using it
I have tried several different conversion programs and always go back to adobe camera raw (currently using v.4).
My questions is: Is it Free? After all the money I'm dropping on camera equipment, I can barely afford the necessary software
Adobe Camera Raw for me. I shall investigate Breeze Browser. It does seem that people often end up preferring one converter over another, the fact is I've never really experimented with much aside from ACR and a little bit with the various Canon options.
This is interesting. I was wondering what the big differences were to the different file formats, and this has done a good job in pointing them out. How big are the memory cards that you are all using? I mean since the file format is so much bigger, how does it affect your image numbers per card?
ray- adobe camera raw is part of photoshop, not a stand alone. jeff- my 5d yields daws in the area of 12-14mb each, depending on the shot... Nothing less than a 2gb for me.. I have 2 2gb and 1 4gb.
Except ACRâ„¢ is ACR lite in Photoshop Elementsâ„¢, and Lightroomâ„¢ uses ACRâ„¢ to convert to DNGâ„¢. But Adobeâ„¢ updates their PS first, then Lightroom and Elements. The 1DMk3 produces 12-15mb files in RAW, I mainly use 2 4GB CF cards, and 1 8GB CF, along with 1 2GB SD, 1 4GB SHDC, and 1 8GB SDHC. But SDHC is very sloooooooooooooow.
