[JohnR]

I decided to have a go at RAW shooting and processing. I'm getting there... I think. One of the challenges is knowing what to with all the controls in Adobe Camera RAW... I understand that one should expose when shooting RAW in order to get the maximum dynamic range and resolution out of the sensor, which means "exposing to the right" i.e. over-exposing some in order to use the higher-order bits. (But not saturating.) Anyway, while it's not a fair comparison, here is a 1-1 crop of an image processed from RAW and a crop of the Basic JPEG of the same shot.

From RAW:

From basic JPEG:

To do this properly I should take the same shot with Fine JPEG and the exposure set to the desired final value. Perhaps next weekend...  Anyway it looks promising

[ooheadsoo]

Will look forward to seeing your "proper" comparison.  This is the first time I've seen a significant difference.

[JohnR]

Well, you got me wondering too! There was enough light left to take another round of shots in the garden. Again, RAW processing on an "overexposed" image, by one stop. I can't figure out how to get the colors to match up exactly, but the out-of-camera JPEG is starting to look a little over-saturated to me now! Anyway, here's another pair of crops.

From RAW, overexposed one stop (relative to JPEG version) and processed in ACR:

Here's the crop directly from the Fine JPEG version, at the exposure that looked best to me at the time:

So... what do you think?

[brj]

The exposures still appear a bit different between the two, but discounting that... it appears (on my uncalibrated LCD monitor) that the colors are actually quite different as well? The RAW image appears more purple while the fine JPEG appears more pink.  I wouldn't have expected a color difference.      Are you seeing the same thing on your monitor?  If so, which one more closely matches what you saw in the garden?

The RAW image appears to have more depth and detail, but that might be the exposure difference as well.

You've got me curious now, John.  I was recording both RAW and fine JPEG for a while, but since I don't have any means of processing RAW at the moment, I switched over to fine JPEG alone.

[brj]

John, does the D40 have any options that affect the in-camera JPEG processing?  If so, how do you have them set?

(The more I look at the in-camera JPEG image, the more I think some degree of sharpening was applied.)

[JohnR]

The RAW image appears to have more depth and detail, but that might be the exposure difference as well.

Ah, well that's why you "expose to the right." To use the full dynamic range of the sensor. Then in the RAW convertor (ACR in my case) you drop the exposure back down a stop (or whatever).

With a scene with highlights in it, you couldn't do that, though.

The color difference is because the camera is doing a bunch of stuff other than JPEG conversion - white balance, saturation etc. To make them look identical I would have to use the same settings in ACR as the camera uses and I don't know what those are  Good question about which one is closer to reality... it's dark now but I'll go look later this week.

[JohnR]

Yes, the camera does sharpening as well. But so does ACR (I used the default value of 25.. whatever that means!) In the D40 it seems you don't get independent control over sharpening, you just get one control for "Normal," "Vivid," "Softer," etc. This probably sets sharpening, saturation, contrast, etc. I have mine set to "Normal," I will try "Softer" next time...

I suspect though that some of what you see as sharpening may be compression and dynamic range artifacts. e.g. the leaf in the background top right.

[JohnR]

This is the article where I read about exposing for RAW

Sermon From a Raw Convert

Edit - wait, that's a good article but this is the exposure one

Expose to the Right

[RAW]

You had me worried John


WE use RAW from time to time in our XT and XTi.The wife does a lot of macro shooting and she find that the RAW works best for her, but myself I do not use it for our products.

Nice comparison.

[JohnR]

Heh, sorry Al! This is all learning for me, another tool in my photographic "arsenal" (heh heh    )

I found this neat article about calibrating ACR, this could explain why my RAW images are a little flatter than the out-of-camera JPEGs. Something to try sometime...

Color Profiling Guide for Adobe Camera Raw 3

[RAW]

That is OK
That is a interesting read John, I passed the links to my wife so she can go over them,so the web not worth it to shoot in RAW but for her she is into scrap booking and is part of a design team online  which teach how to classes.She finds her own personal gallery it works best in RAW due to macro shooting all the time.


John what kind and size of card you using to shoot in RAW we use the SD 2-4 gig

[JohnR]

Hey Al, I use a SanDisk Ultra II 1 Gig card. Even if I shot RAW all the time it should hold almost 200 shots which is enough for me... Over five rolls of film I tend to delete poor images as I go along as well.

I suppose what got me started on this was I was in the National Portrait Gallery a few weeks ago at an exhibition where the photographer had traveled around Australia photographing artists in their studios. He mostly used a very wide angle lens, some great photos altho 50 of them might have been just a bit too much of a good thing... anyway one print, which must have been a meter and a half on the long side, had the artist with a very orange painting behind him. And around his head, you could see "ripples" that looked for all the world like some kind of JPEG artifact. Hm, thinks I, that one slipped through

So, well, what do I know, I won't be hanging in the National Portrait Gallery any time soon () but I thought why not explore a little further. Eventually I would like to have photos that I can be proud to print large and hang on my wall. And anyway, since my camera does it (RAW) I really oughtta learn how to use it! So today has been very educational

Does your wife have any photos online?

[jcrane]

One thing too remember about the RAW vs Jpeg is that you must add some sharpening to the RAW image when you are finished with the PP.
I use either Smart Sharpen or Unsharp Mask (USM) in CS2. The Jpeg will have some sharpening applied to it in camera and is why many times people elect the Jpeg as being better.
I use RAW as it offers me more freedom and with Storage space being almost free, I don't see the difference in space.


Jamie

[JohnR]

Cool, thanks! I'll look at Smart Sharpen. I have CS2 but didn't know about that feature...

One question I have though, is that since ACR has sharpening in it as well, what would be the advantage of Smart Sharpen?

On the flower picture, I think some may have missed that this is a 1-1 crop i.e. 4% of the total image. Also, it was taken with an 85mm lens at f2, so the total depth of field is less than a centimeter.

[Vapor Audio]

Once you learn how to work with raw's, you'll never go back.  Anything I think I might print, or use for anything other than basic web shots is taken in raw. 

Nikon's raw processor is far superior to Adobe ACR or any other raw processor btw ...

[JohnR]

Nikon's raw processor is far superior to Adobe ACR or any other raw processor btw ...

In terms of image quality? Do you have any examples?

[ooheadsoo]

Very interesting comparisons.  I'm not sure I like the sharpening in the jpeg.

[Vapor Audio]

Nikon's raw processor is far superior to Adobe ACR or any other raw processor btw ...

In terms of image quality? Do you have any examples?

Download the 30 day trial of Nikon Capture NX and see for yourself.  What I've seen from Capture compared to Photoshop is better color, contrast, dynamic range, and image detail.  Capture also gives you much better raw controls.  Do all your raw changes in Capture, then import to Photoshop for the pixel manipulation.

[Double Ugly]

Download the 30 day trial of Nikon Capture NX and see for yourself.  What I've seen from Capture compared to Photoshop is better color, contrast, dynamic range, and image detail.  Capture also gives you much better raw controls.  Do all your raw changes in Capture, then import to Photoshop for the pixel manipulation.

How's it compare to Aperture?  Have you ever used it?

I just received Aperture yesterday, but I don't know how to use it yet.  Even so, I'd *really* like to avoid buying another program w/o skimping on RAW processing and editing capabilities.

Thanks.

[nathanm]

I dunno how you guys have the patience for RAW.  It sounds nice in theory, but in practice I've found it's just a great way to make life difficult for yourself.  Really Annoying Workflow I'd call it.  The way I see it RAW can save your ass in a few ways:

1. Eliminates the need for choosing the 'correct' white balance for the subject
2. Er, I can't think of anything else...

Perhaps I am biased, but I can't imagine things being any slower or more of a convoluted pain in the ass than "Hyper-Utility2" for my Fuji Finepix S9100.  RAW does give you a little larger file size in this case, but not much.  But as far as "editing" images it's a cruel joke.  It's like using Photoshop on a Commodore 64.  I might as well strap chains onto my mouse hand, cause that's what it feels like to use this piece of crap!

Of course another theoretical advantage of RAW is the lack of JPEG compression - well, in the Fuji's case the RAW image is not the pristine, clean, stair-stepped pixels like you want, there's still blockiness and patterny crud in there.  Noise reduction I suppose.  Okay, so it's a cheap POS camera perhaps, but the software is just unbearably slow.  To me it makes more sense to make sure I've got the camera settings right and shoot Fine JPEG and enjoy lickity-split Photoshop post-processing as opposed to futzing with the hokey RAW software.  I can't blame my Mac for it either because if Photoshop can do all these same operations on a large file with satisfying speed and the RAW processor is slow as molasses I'm blaming the code!