Getting started with digital photography! ;)

Hello everybody, I'll receive soon my K20d and a 18-55 and I'll start my new (serious) life in digital photography!

At the end I decided to shoot in Raw+Jpeg and to use Picasa+Picnik and GIMP+UFRaw+G'MIC...so I'll be able to receive regular updates without paying for the software.

Now...I'm looking for guides, tutorials, howto, etch...
I mean...I'm tick...I don't know what a layer is, I don't know what an histogram is...
Is there any "serious digital photography for dummies"?

Youtube has lots of lessons on photoshop.

Also try the excellent Learn my shot.com

This one should have answers to most of your questions but it's a bit deep sometimes.
www.cambridgeincolour.com

For editing there are a lot of tips and tricks to find on the web so just search and you will find.

Thanks for the website, it's very useful!

Did you guys know RAWTherapee? What do you think about it?

Actually...I think I may have a problem with RAWTherapee...

When I open it I have a dos-prompt window with this message:

(rt.exe:356: Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "clearlooks",

What does it mean?

I think you'll find you may be wasting your time shooting RAW+ unless you have a very specific need to have both files at the same time. Shooting RAW you'll have to convert to JPG at the end of the day anyway.

gartmore, interested in your comment as I always shoot RAW+ which I thought was for this reason:

If I am happy with the jpeg I can just use that without having to spend any time post processing but if I do need to tweak I have the RAW to do a better tweaking job with. 95% of the time I am happy with the jpeg. Maybe I just have low standards

If I just shot RAW I would always have to do some PP as 'out of the camera' the RAW shot will not look as good as the jpeg , for example people always seem to need to apply some sharpening to a RAW. I realise that could be done as 'batch' but really don't want to have to do any PP unless the shot really needs (1 in 200 or so) it or is a 'special' one ( 1 in 1000.)

Do you think my logic is based on a misunderstanding? I am keen to check I am not wasting card space but would rather that than have to spend more time PPing.

RAW+jpeg is very handy - you don't have to think about which format you should be shooting in (is this a quick 'record' shot or a masterpiece?) and memory's cheap enough.... Plus there's no risk of accidentally shooting in the wrong format!

The jpeg also serves as a preview image if your PC doesn't show RAW images in thumbnails. However now I'm on LR3 so this is less important and I tend to err towards shooting just RAW more than I used to.

I shoot RAW+ on something like a wedding where I know I will use the RAW files for the pictures the client eventually wants, the JPGS are uploaded to the client area of my web site.

I shoot RAW if I'm in unpredictable or difficult situations.

I shoot JPG in the controlled conditions of the studio which will require no or very little tweaking afterwards.

You only require the Pentax codec to view Pentax RAW files in Windows

Eastridge, I set my camera to '+1' sharpening, then use the default settings in Adobe Camera Raw and no further sharpening is required.

We are going off topic here though...
I try to shoot to the right so i've no use for JPG's out of the camera at all since they are overexposed

I've no idea, have you tried reinstalling it?

Which version of Rawtherapee are you using? The rather old v2.4.1 is said to be stable. The newer variants in v3 are still in beta testing and are still under development so users can expect some bugs.

I would uninstall and try v2.4.1

Rawtherapee is a fairly easy program to use.

Another possibility is Helicon Filter - there is a free version.

Dan - could also try FastStone's Image Viewer. Don't use it for anything other than as an alternative viewer myself but it has a full set of tools. It's free for personal use.

It's got a sibling, Photo Resizer which I find really quite useful for batch file renaming and image resizing - i.e. for making posts of images to PU or other web sites.

Try link


Steve

We are not off-topic, read the original post.