unimpressed with RAW

[D-50]

MUI you say when you look at your photos at 100% they are not sharp, now I know this is what they teach you in design/art school but it is not a good determinate of picture quality, yeah if its sharp at 100% then you will definatly have a sharp picture but start printing photos and look at the quality, as I say a computer screen is no place to display photos.

 

[mui]

cheers for this; it's great feedback.

couple of questions;

1. what are you using to edit RAW? PS plugin? CS3? My assumed workflow (not having either of these options) was to convert straight away to TIF and then head to PS to edit. But now I'm realising the convert to TIF is going to loose the information (to be able to correct over exposures etc.)

2. Surely there is a limit to how much you can correct with RAW (ie. a completely blown out white frame surely won't bring back a properly exposed image with post shooting tweaks?)

3. 'computer screen is no place to display photos' - i agree. i just had a particularly nasty run in with a printers technician the other day with a photograph which looks good (composition, lighting etc) but technically isn't great - looking at 100% it's not sharp, and it's noisy etc. for me, these details aren't as important as having an artistically good image - but it made me think that perhaps at 100% my images should be sharp...

 

[jon_k]

If raw is unimpressive

Fix the white balance in this jpeg

With RAW it'd be a simple click of "auto" white balance, or click the white balance appropriate for the shot.

How do you do it in jpeg? If you can fix it, I'll be impressed.

HINT: The markers should be white instead of a tinge of orange/yellow. Fixing the markers should be easy, but appropriately fixing the color heads on the marker becomes increasingly difficult.

The third one on the top is bright green, but not fluorescent green.

 

[nossie]

Jon_k I accept your challenge! Post what you can do from the RAW. You can use cooling filters in CS but we'd be hit and miss since we don't know the original. Looks to me your crayons were shot under a table lamp with maybe only a 25-40watt bulb. Even RAW will struggle to bring that back completely.

1. what are you using to edit RAW? PS plugin? CS3? My assumed workflow (not having either of these options) was to convert straight away to TIF and then head to PS to edit. But now I'm realising the convert to TIF is going to loose the information (to be able to correct over exposures etc.)

Currently I'm trying out Adobe Bridge -> Camera RAW -> Photoshop in CS3. They all work together like different windows of the one app really.
Combined they have some super tools built for correcting everything from colour temperature to fringeing caused by Chromatic Aberration.

So I start out with Adobe Bridge to browse thumbnails of my RAW files.
I pick one and double click on it, it will now open in Camera Raw 4.2.
I adjust some settings on how the RAW file will be opened [Note: I'm never adjusting the RAW file] (I'm not even sure that you can.) I am adjusting the settings only, the settings are saved with the RAW file but are seperate. Now when I open the RAW file the settings are applied and the photo opens in Photoshop. If I save it now it will be saved as a .psd which is the entire project we are working in, so if you just open and save the photo it will save just the photo as a tiff+ some meta data. If I add laters and effects etc etc then it's a lot of tiffs+ all the extra information.
I can save this psd and work with it forever more without any loss. When I want to print the photo I'll output it as jpeg. (Although maybe I should try a few comparison prints from tiff)

Currently the only feature I'm missing from the CS3 set is a batch RAW to Jpeg conversion. It's available in the Canon software. You can apply your settings including output image size and then it'll convert all the selected shots to jpeg in one click. It was good for quick review. I must investigate.

2. Surely there is a limit to how much you can correct with RAW (ie. a completely blown out white frame surely won't bring back a properly exposed image with post shooting tweaks?)

Correct. You are still bound by the rules of photography and the limitations and must get your exposure right to begin with and you are also bound by the limitations of the sensor etc but remember you started with the question of RAW Vs Jpeg. Just like film the sensor has a stop range that it can work in. You can spend a year reading up on this endlessly but loosely speaking jpeg crops down to 8 bits of the available 12bits from the sensor. (note sensors vary,e.g. the new canon 1ds is 14bits) but we'll leave all that to online articles already published.
Doing a search on RAW Vs Jpeg will bring up many informative articles.

 

[Alex_B]

cheers for this; it's great feedback.

couple of questions;

1. what are you using to edit RAW? PS plugin? CS3? My assumed workflow (not having either of these options) was to convert straight away to TIF and then head to PS to edit. But now I'm realising the convert to TIF is going to loose the information (to be able to correct over exposures etc.)

I use Bibble Pro, allows me to do all I need including correction of the lens distortion for wide angle architecture shots with just a click (via a lens database). I set the parameters for all shots from a shooting, then click go and have a cup of tea. when I come back they are all transformed into JPG or TIFF or whatever I want.

Bibble is not good with sharpening (all RAW sensor data have to be sharpened, since you lose sharpness in the de-mosaicing of the colour/pixel information from the sensor), So I use CS2 for the sharpening. For all the rest (white blalance, contrast, cloning out dust, stuck pixels, cropping, whatever) I use Bibble Pro.

But there are many other RAW converters, such as Lightroom, Aperture, BreezeBrowser, Phase one, ...

2. Surely there is a limit to how much you can correct with RAW (ie. a completely blown out white frame surely won't bring back a properly exposed image with post shooting tweaks?)

RAW is not really made to save shots where it all went wrong, it cannot bring back data which were not captured by the sensor.
However it does help with slightly off-exposed images, or images with difficult lighting where every exposure setting is just a compromise.

Also, since the RAW image is not sharpened, you do not lose any image information by sharpening, but you can do the sharpening yourself depending on the geometrical structures in your image.

3. 'computer screen is no place to display photos' - i agree. i just had a particularly nasty run in with a printers technician the other day with a photograph which looks good (composition, lighting etc) but technically isn't great - looking at 100% it's not sharp, and it's noisy etc. for me, these details aren't as important as having an artistically good image - but it made me think that perhaps at 100% my images should be sharp...

You can always do a bit extra sharpening
later, and also noise reduction (Noise Ninja or Neat image) can be applied.
Also most RAW converters have noise reduction implemented.

 

[Mesoam]

this isn't directed towards anyone but a good point is that no matter what file format you use the photograph is still created by the photographer. I have seen some amazing pictures taken with a camera phone! While at the same time you can give any person a DSLR with raw and still get just poor images...

 

[Garbz]

Which reminds me I recently saw a video of a photographer who mentions the very last thing he does is sharpen the image based on what it'll be used for an the medium it will be printed on. Really you can't get away without it.

Mui you don't expect the image to be sharp at 100% do you? Firstly you'd need a lens which outperforms your sensor, even then you'd need to realise the bayer pattern on a sensor means it is not capturing a single pixel and determining it's colour. It's capturing 4 in a grid (Red Blue and two Green) and then interpolating the final result. I have never seen a truly pin sharp image at 100% which didn't use some form of sharpening.

Furthermore you're not loosing any information if you convert to a 16bit TIFF. All the colour information is still there in its full definition. Converting to an 8bit TIFF or JPEG causes you to loose the benefits.

 

[JNDesigns]

Hello all. Being this is my first post I felt it appropriate to jump in head first.

I have been shooting in RAW (Nikon NEF) for about a year now. Previously I shot in all High Res Jpeg as that was all the Sony I owned at the time could produce.

One major advantage, that doesn't seem to have been brought up in this thread, in shooting RAW over Jpeg is the archiving factor. Every time you edit and re-save a Jpeg image, it compresses itself again, losing precious detail. RAW, being an uncompressed format which includes all of the data from the image sensor is not subject to this. So it is safe to keep your files archived for later use.

Great discussion! I read several of the discussions in this forum before joining. Glad to be a part of such an active group of photographers.

All the best,
Jason

 

[nossie]

Hi Jason.
Welcome to the transatlantic mottled forum.

... Every time you edit and re-save a Jpeg image, it compresses itself again, losing precious detail. RAW, being an uncompressed format which includes all of the data from the image sensor is not subject to this.

True, it wasn't written here (until you joined in) but you'll find it in other active threads.

Good stuff by the sounds of it you'll have more to share.

:thumbup:

 

[Garbz]

Yes if you have limit less hard disk space. If you're like me and you edit the photo to completion at the very beginning then there's no reason not to archive in JPEG. I certainly won't go back and edit previous photos any more, so there's no need to store the extra bitdepth which makes no visible difference. Infact there's plenty of arguments against archiving in NEF most of which disappear if you archive in Photoshop's open DNG format.

 

[nossie]

Yes if you have limit less hard disk space. If you're like me and you edit the photo to completion at the very beginning then there's no reason not to archive in JPEG. I certainly won't go back and edit previous photos any more, so there's no need to store the extra bitdepth which makes no visible difference. Infact there's plenty of arguments against archiving in NEF most of which disappear if you archive in Photoshop's open DNG format.

DVDs are cheap enough for just in case.

 

[Garbz]

Yeah like I said it depends on how you work. Archiving in NEF or some other 16bit lossless format makes sense if you edit them.

If you do though I don't recommend DVD's as your backup. They'll typically only last 5 years or so before they become unreadable. Plus it's almost cheaper these days to just buy another HDD. And having a HDD that isn't plugged into anything is a far better archiving method than optical media for sensitive materials.

 

[JerryPH]

If you do though I don't recommend DVD's as your backup. They'll typically only last 5 years or so before they become unreadable. Plus it's almost cheaper these days to just buy another HDD. And having a HDD that isn't plugged into anything is a far better archiving method than optical media for sensitive materials.

I would respectfully disagree.

The mean life of a standard DVD stored in a case not in direct sunlight is at least 50 years. The standard life (MTBF) of most hard drives is measured in hours (a high end hard drive will have a 50,000 MTBF failure rating. Some high end SCSI drives go as high as 150,000 hours).

I have hundreds of 10+ year old data and music CDRs that I use successfully, and some have quite a few scratches and are far from pristine in condition.

I also have well over 100 DVDs of pictures and video stored from as recent as this morning to as old as 4 years old... and all are 100% readable and functional.

Do not think that hard drives last near as long or are as safe as a CD or DVD. I deal with customers on a weekly basis that think so, and I suppose that if I had to put a number to it, these people alone augment my business by at least $10,000 a year for data recovery, restoration, etc... due to failed hard drives used as "backup only".

How one DVD or CD would not be readable is when it is written on a well used writer that due to wear has head alignment out of tolerance. When you change to a new writer over time because this writer no longer functioned (they do wear out quite fast), the alignment of the new writer, becuase it is within tolerances, will not be able to read the old CD or DVD.

Thats the only possible reason. Digital data does not magically change or deteriorate on the CD or DVD over time... unless it is abused (ie: overheated becuase it was left out in the sun), but thats physical damage.

 

[Alex_B]

The mean life of a standard DVD stored in a case not in direct sunlight is at least 50 years. The standard life (MTBF) of most hard drives is measured in hours (a high end hard drive will have a 50,000 MTBF failure rating. Some high end SCSI drives go as high as 150,000 hours).

But those are hours in operation for the HDD ...

I backup on HDDs for over 10 years now, never any loss of data. of course you need redundancy and you need to buy a new harddrive every 1 or 2 years.

Thats the only possible reason. Digital data does not magically change or deteriorate on the CD or DVD over time... unless it is abused

Wrong, as far as I know, they age, slowly, but they do, and it does not need extreme sunlight or heat.


just a quick search in wikipedia:


Burned CD-Rs suffer from material degradation, just like most writable media. CD-R media have an internal layer of dye used to store data. In a CD-RW disc, the recording layer is made of an alloy of silver and other metals — indium, antimony, and tellurium.[3] In CD-R media, the dye itself can degrade causing data to become unreadable.
As well as degradation of the dye, failure of a CD-R can be due to the reflective surface. While silver is less expensive and more widely used, it is more prone to oxidation resulting in a non-reflecting surface. Gold on the other hand, although more expensive and no longer widely used, is an inactive material and so, gold-based CD-Rs do not suffer from this problem.

 

[nossie]

Actually I burn 2 DVDs for each backup and if there's space on the dvd I'll burn each file twice to the same dvd.

Here's typically how I have my storage setup.
3 x 500GB drives in RAID5 giving me 1TB storage. If one drive dies I can replace it with a new clean drive and the other two will rebuild it. 2 different makes = 2 different life expectancies.
Mostly I keep the last year's RAW files on these HDs and all of my photos as a smaller jpeg about 1mb for easy instant viewing.
Every now and then depending on how much shooting I've done I'll burn to 2 DVDs, put them in envelopes and then the envelopes into a box with some silica gel I got with my shoes to rot away into oblivion since there's a limit to how far I'm willing to go for this, i.e. I'm not going to build a nuclear bunker for them as someone asked "what if your house burns down?" Then it's sods law!