If you are new to this blog, it probably would be to your benefit to start at the bottom post and work your way up. This blog is sponsored by weshoot.com, where you may see many examples of architectural photos, and bilbord.com, where you can see extensive retouching and enhancement of building images. Its purpose is to give anyone who wishes to photograph building interiors and exteriors the knowledge of how to do so correctly, and what to do in post-production work to make their images better and more professional-looking. I will periodically be adding to this blog. Please note that I do not allow blogspamming in comments, and any attempt to do so will wind up with the comment being removed.

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Getting a raw deal can be a good thing! Of course, I am talking about using raw images for your photography. If you are using a digital camera that does not have the capability to shoot raw images, and aren't interested, you can tune out. But, if you can shoot in the raw format, or think you might want to shoot raw at some time, you might want to read this.

Photographers with DSLRs usually have a choice of shooting raw, shooting jpegs, or shooting raw with the addition of the same image in a jpeg. There are probably some fixed lens cameras that offer the same options. If you haven't tried out the raw format, you should.

My first "high-res" digital camera was the Nikon Coolpix 990. It was (believe it or not), 3.34 megapixel. It offered 3 resolutions of jpegs, or the output of tiff images. It did not offer raw. The 990 was a great camera, and I made money with it. I decided to use the highest res jpegs as the tiff images it shot were no better than these jpegs, and they took up a lot more room on the compact flash card. In those days, a 32-meg card was quite expensive (way more than I recently paid for a one GB card), and would only hold around 4 tiffs, but would hold 23 high-res jpegs. The choice was clear. I would shoot jpegs. Jpegs, however, have an Achilles Heel. If you keep saving them over and over, the way I would during retouching, they will start artifacting like crazy. So, once an image was taken and copied to the hard-drive, the first act was to convert it to a tiff, which can be saved over and over again with no image loss. The tiff was only as good as the original jpeg, however. Jpegs don't have a whole lot of latitude. Something on the order of film transparencies - about 5 f-stops from dark to light. Raw images only show the same 5 stops latitude on a computer screen, but have a couple of additional stops that the image can be moved through for adjustment.

A lot of pro images these days are composites of several exposures to allow for the outdoors being brighter than the indoors, etc. See the images of the Japanese spa in the archives on this blog (Sept 2005) to get the gist. One of the things you can do with a raw image is darken or lighten it 2 to 3 stops in either direction. That means that if you have a perfectly exposed or slightly dark interior and you darken the raw image in a good raw image editor, the outdoors may become more visible through the window. You can make a tiff image of the darker version and layer it with a tiff image of a lighter version of the same image. This exends your latitude. In Photoshop, you can erase the window area of the lighter version on the top layer to expose the darker version underneath.

This brings us to the choice of a raw photo editing program. This may be difficult to follow for neophytes, but if you are interested, the terms will become more familiar the deeper you get into it.

I had recently just bought a new Nikon D80, which had been out for all of 2 weeks when I decided to purchase one. This is a 10.2 mpxl camera, and runs around $1,000.00. Now, my main program for reworking images is Photoshop CS2. It has a program called Camera Raw which is supposed to open most raw images. It, however, would not open the raw images from the new D80! It seems that the new plug-in was not yet available for this new camera's raw images. I ordered the camera to take night shots (like the one in this post) because it had better low-light capability than my old cameras. Only thing was that I needed to open and edit the images yesterday. Now, the Nikon D80 came with some software called Picture Project. It is not really a raw editor. It is more of a raw opener. There are almost no adjustments available, and the image can be exported as a 16-bit tiff only. I needed something better. I got advice from another photographer. He said to try Phase One's Capture One software. He swore by it. I downloaded the cheaper version, LE, which came with a 15-day free trial. I tried it out, but it was missing some features that I would need for my work-flow. LE was priced around $125.00. I then downloaded the pro version (with a 30-day free trial) and I liked it better. It costs around $500.00 list. That price made me swallow hard. After some wheeling and dealing with a representative, I was able to negotiate it down to $450.00. Still a lot of money to edit raw images. I wasn't convinced I would like to spend that much moola. Then Adobe came out with a beta version of Camera Raw with raw capability for the D80, and it was free. I took the same image and edited it with the Adobe program, and also with the Capture One program. Hands down, Capture One was the better choice for output. I went on the 'net to see what Nikon had for raw editing. They had come out with Capture NX, and it worked with the D80 images. I downloaded the Nikon program and it had a 30-day free trial. It went for $149.99. I edited the same raw image again with the Nikon program and compared the tiff images produced. The Nikon program was the clear winner here. The image looked the best with Capture NX, and it had a feature that the others don't seem to have: control points. I can spot lighten, darken, saturate, or change the contrast of a partial area on the image. And the price suited my pocketbook. I bought the Nikon program. If you have a Nikon, you might want to check out Capture NX. If you have another brand, good luck.


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