Celebrate RAW! :)

EJBPhoto · May 19, 2007

I finally switched over today and honestly? I'm so glad I did. So much more control. I underexposed this by a stop but being able to fix it later on was such a help. It's just my mother with a lot of pping to make her look younger

If you haven't switched to RAW yet but you're intimidated- its SO easy and so spectacular. Ps. These were taken with my 50mm 1.8.

Thanks for looking. CC welcome if you'd like

Sw1tchFX · May 19, 2007

I know, now don't you wish you could go back and take old shots in RAW? I like how much sharper they are, when you're working with huge DOF, you can really tell what's in focus instead of seeing everything all mashed together.

EJBPhoto · May 19, 2007

mmmmhmmm I know what you mean

I took this at f/1.8 and it was tack sharp when I opened it

Sw1tchFX · May 19, 2007

Oh yeah, I can't stand Jpegs for soul reason that they're soft form NR and Anti-aliasing filters. The only problem I have is sometimes my 17-55 is too sharp and I get aliasing.

LaFoto · May 19, 2007

Sw1tchFX said:
I know, now don't you wish you could go back and take old shots in RAW?

Oh yesssss!
So very, very, very, VERY much!!!

Congrats to "the step", and this is a nice photo of your mom.
I want the 50mm 1.8 lens, too (have I mentioned that ever in the past some 6 months or so?).

Oh. Erm :scratch: ... what is aliasing?

EJBPhoto · May 19, 2007

Oh get it, it's so cheap and its such a great lens! I want the 85mm soon I think... Then possibly the 30 next. I'm a prime kind of girl.

Thanks for commenting yall

d1a1s1 · May 19, 2007

Hold on a second here. At the risk of starting the whole raw vs. jpg discussion...actually...that might be impossible. Im just going to switch to raw first, ask questions later.

Sw1tchFX · May 19, 2007

LaFoto said:
Oh. Erm :scratch: ... what is aliasing?

Aliasing is nasty,

Fashion shooters call it Moire or spacial aliasing, it's basically when, say the cloth patterns line up with the sensor grid pattern. It looks like this:

I've never gotten this off my camera, but I have different aliasing problem when there's a small object with a really tight pattern. It only happens when i'm using REALLY sharp lenses. It looks like a grid:

This is a peice of a RAW file at 100% magnification. You can see individual pixels off my sensor on the grill of that SUV.

not pretty eh? It usually only happens on cameras that don't' have hardware anti-aliasing filters. I'm pretty sure that all Nikon's have software anti-aliasing filters, but all it does is blur the image.

LaFoto · May 19, 2007

Oh, thanks!
I only have the cheap run-of-the-mill lenses, so that is probably why I have never come across this phenomenon so far.

Sw1tchFX · May 19, 2007

Yeah, that and I'm 99% sure that canon has a physical filter in front of the sensor to prevent this, but at the same time it reduces contrast, that's why you need unsharp mask. The SUV i posted is straight out of my camera as a RAW, no sharpening, no nothing whatsoever.

JaimeGibb · May 19, 2007

What's RAW?!?!

Garbz · May 19, 2007

RAW is the raw sensor data from the digital camera. If your camera allows shooting in this file type it is often a 8-20MB image with no camera processing done at all. Software can read this in all it's 12bit glory and convert it to normal images.

The best part is most people are intimidated by the file size, but why keep it like that? Once your image is final there's no reason to keep it as a raw. Save it as a high quality JPEG and you're done.

Riggaberto · May 20, 2007

Garbz said:
RAW is the raw sensor data from the digital camera. If your camera allows shooting in this file type it is often a 8-20MB image with no camera processing done at all. Software can read this in all it's 12bit glory and convert it to normal images.

The best part is most people are intimidated by the file size, but why keep it like that? Once your image is final there's no reason to keep it as a raw. Save it as a high quality JPEG and you're done.

I keep all my raws in case I want to edit it later. There's plenty of reason to keep it.

Sw1tchFX · May 20, 2007

Garbz said:
RAW is the raw sensor data from the digital camera. If your camera allows shooting in this file type it is often a 8-20MB image with no camera processing done at all. Software can read this in all it's 12bit glory and convert it to normal images.

The best part is most people are intimidated by the file size, but why keep it like that? Once your image is final there's no reason to keep it as a raw. Save it as a high quality JPEG and you're done.

no no no! TIFF's or PSD's! Why would you want to throw away data by saving as a jpeg?

NJMAN · May 21, 2007

Celebrate RAW!
I finally switched over today and honestly? I'm so glad I did. So much more control. I underexposed this by a stop but being able to fix it later on was such a help. It's just my mother with a lot of pping to make her look younger ;-) If you haven't switched to RAW yet but you're intimidated- its SO easy and so spectacular. Ps. These were taken with my 50mm 1.8.

YES! RAW is the way to go. Learn the ins and outs of RAW and you will see the benefits, I promise you. And the 50mm f/1.8 ROCKS! For the money, the "thrifty fifty" can't be beat! Of course, the 50mm f/1.4 is better, but costs more than 4x as much. BTW, great photo of your mom.