Getting to Grips with RAW

I'm just starting to investigate RAW capture, a bit late I know but there's a lot of demands on my time....

So far, we have two lines of investigation. I have tried Pentax Laboratory, making an 8 bit TIFF file and then manipulating in PS7 as usual. The reason - my PC won't take CS2 and there is nothing I really want to adjust in terms of exposure.

Sue has CS2 and imported her files directly into that, no problem, using CS2 to open the files.

Initially, it looks as though some pictures benefit a lot from an increased amount of sharpness. There isn't any more detail, but it can be rendered better. However, some shots, principally branches against sky, actually look much smoother in the JPEG capture - the RAW files are relatively ragged in appearance. Other shots make little difference one way or another.

Any thoughts on this?

For my humble requirements I found Raw Shooter Essentials to be superior in its pre-conversion manipulation capabilities to the RAW converter that Adobe provide for Photoshop-CS. I have no experience of the CS2 variant. I now use the premium version of Raw Shooter Essentials but the free version is more than adequate for most things. You can download it from www.pixmantec.com and they also host a useful forum. After I've tweaked my pic, I squirt it into PS-CS and have used Matt-Matics Sharpen-O-Matic action with excellent results (Thanks MM).

Possibly a better recommendation would be to replace your PC if it is not capable of running CS2. Good quality, fast, & reliable computer hardware is dirt cheap at the moment.

For those who are new to, or thinking of switching to RAW, these 2 documents from the Adobe web pages should be of great interest.

Understanding Digital Raw Capture
http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/pdfs/understanding_digitalrawcapture.pdf
and
Raw Capture and Linear Gamma and Exposure
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/pdfs/linear_gamma.pdf

John - interesting observation.
You probably know my thoughts on which RAW convertor to use ( ), but one thing I've found with them all (and I have most of the main contenders: CS1, CS2, Pixmantec Premium, C1LE, Pentax, dcRAW) - it takes quite a time to get serious results

With all of them you should be able to adjust the noise reduction and sharpening amounts. (Personally, I choose not to sharpen in the convertor.)

If you want me to test any images, feel free to contact me with the PEF file.

Mannesty - glad you found the SoM useful.

Matt

The CS2 version of ACR is much improved, it operates within Bridge now, and you can do your RAW adjustments, and then save the adjustments without opening the file! I like to go through the keepers, do the basic RAW adjustments (exposure, white balance, straighten and crop) and then go back and do detail work on my favorites.

You can do a lot in the RAW converters, which makes the final touch-up in Photoshop or whatever to be much faster.

I find I seldom need to do much at all after the RAW conversion in Capture One LE. Resizing and final sharpening I usually do in Irfanview becuase it's so quick, and can deal with a batch very easily.

Note that Irfanview has a better sharpening tool in the Effects Browser (Ctrl-E).

G

This subjecy merits a longer evaluation, but the initial conclusions are as follows.

First the software. I have tried Pentax Photo Lab (poor, leaves lots of chromatic abberation), CS2 (very easy to use and effective), Rawshooter Elements 2005 (not so nice to use as CS2 but just as effective)

On screen, it can clearly be seen that, from 200% onwards at least, the detail in a RAW shot can be rendered significantly more clearly. However, there is no more detail revealed, it is just crisper. This is similar in a way to how films of different speeds behave. A 400 ISO film shows as much detail as a 50 ISO, but it is fuzzier.

I say can be rendered more clearly, but would add not necessarily so, depending, it would seem, on the subject matter. Some shots have better reproduction as a JPEG capture, being smoother and having less ragged edges. It is possible that smoother textures are reproduced better by JPEG.

Then I made A3 prints of these two types of subjects, one of some notices with rust and smooth surface texture and one of a very complex and detailed mass of twigs and leaves.

The pictures were viewed by several people and the opinions were unanimous. The notice boards were sharper and better with JPEG capture and the twigs were better with RAW. No doubts from anyone.

The difference was very slight. Universally observable, but slight. Viewed in isolation with no reference point, all the prints were fine.

Conclusion, RAW can give sharper fine detail, but may not be best for all subjects, and if you make prints no larger than A4 you can probably forget the issue altogether.

This is all with refernce to the end quality. I'll add a further post about workflow later on, because that is a different issue.

Over to you for any comments!

John,

Since we know that JPEG throws away some detail in compression, while RAW doesn't, and that RAW captures more detail anyway, (12 bit against 8 bit) it MUST be possible to produce a better image, or at least no worse, with RAW than with JPEG, even if you have to convert the RAW file to JPEG at the end.

I have to say that your results seem to me to be a test, not of RAW versus JPEG, but of how well you yourself have mastered RAW conversion.

Sorry if that's a bit brutal, but you admit yourself that your RAW experience is limited, and your results do seem to fly in the face of reason.

G

Quite agree with George

The in-camera JPG comes from the RAW file anyway - the camera just throws away the RAW data.

As I've mentioned many times before, it takes time to get to grips with RAW conversion.

To be honest, it's a bit like comparing high-street film processors to hand-developed. We all know that hand-developing takes skill and experience. Likewise with RAW

You won't get any more resolution from the RAW file - that's limited by the sensor size. You do get (1) more control over exposure (both global and localised), (2) ability to upsize more cleanly, (3) freedom from JPG artifacts.

Perhaps the best thing is to make the DNG/PEF available for those who've had some RAW experience

Matt

The trouble is, both sides of this discussion have no idea what the terms of reference and abilities of the other side are. I don't dispute that the RAW capture will enable crisper, sharper results, and as Matt says above we also agree that there is no more resolution as such in the RAW capture, as this is sensor dependent.

Far from flying in the face of reason, I have been testing the possibilities and challenging the received wisdom to see for myself. I think I can produce better prints from JPEG captures than many people can produce using RAW, but that is more of a reflection on the other parts of the photographic process. In the same way, Bert Hardy made the point in the 1950s by producing his famous Box Camera series.

In the end a great picture is worth more than a technically superior one.

However, back to the point. I concluded that RAW capture gave superior results. In some cases JPEG can result in a more pleasing print. I also concluded that RAW is not necessary for a lot of purposes, even high quality printing. And probably the ability of the printer to render the detail is a factor there in any case.

I actually have no axe to grind one way or the other, but the real message is "Don't accept the received wisdom as the absolute truth, try it for yourself and make your own judgement for your own work."

But please, feel free to be as brutal as you like, it's certain to be a lively evening on Tuesday when I present this subject at our ADAPS Digital Night.

OK, here goes with the rest of my thoughts on the process.

There is indeed a lot to think about in the whole procedure, but I do believe that if we start with the best possible image then everything else will fall into place. So we need correct exposure particularly, and although I have seen many references to being able to alter the exposure in the RAW converter, if the exposure is right to begin with then we don't need to. I expose as if I were using slide film, and seem to have no problem in this.

Colour temperature can be adjusted here, or later in CS2 via the photo filters. There's something else to assess - which is better?

Sharpness in general should be done last, which seems to imply that it's better done at the end in PS. Something else to check out.

The ability to adjust highlight and shadow contrast is interesting.

And then I created an 8 bit TIFF. I can't see the point in making a JPEG at this point, which seems to spoil the effort IMHO. Of course we could create a 16 bit TIFF and maybe we should.

My conclusion as regards issues like these is that I will use RAW capture when I want to capture lots of fine detail in the best way possible, making the prints have a distinct edge over the JPEG route. This is an issue of image quality rather than the ability to alter the image parameters after capture. This is why I think it's important for us to understand what we are trying to achieve and then use the appropriate techniques. I think RAW will from now be a part of the process.

I will also be using JPEG capture and I have yet to fully assess which subjects this will be appropriate for, but I suspect that portraiture may well be one of them.

In digital photography the end result required is important in selecting the settings used, and I won't be using RAW files and 6.1MP images to put pictures on eBay or ePHOTOzine!

I'll be interested in any comments, as contentious as you like....

As Matt says, the image is always captured as RAW, and then converted to JPG in the camera if you have specified that you want that to be done. The alternatives are unconverted RAW or TIFF.

So what this comes down to is that you, with a powerful PC, expensive software, and time, can't do better than the tiny processor in the camera, using very general algorithms.

Well, I can believe it at your present level of expertise, but I'm sure you'll improve!

And by the way, this isn't about "received wisdom", it's about common sense. Its about whether expensive and complex tools, applied with intelligence to a specific image can do better than a tiny chip with a tiny program using the same approach to every picture.

G

I used to shoot a mixture of JPEG and RAW, and now just shoot RAW. It's easier to have just one system, though it does mean you need lots of disk space and high capacity cards.

I would agree that if you have a perfect exposure with limited dynamic range then results from RAW and JPEG will not be much different. And I agree that one should always strive to make the original image as good as can be.

But how often do you really get a perfect exposure?

I don't think there is any reason why you should get sharper images in RAW. It's still the same number of pixels.

I also see no reason to convert to TIFF. If you get everything right in RAW, then a final resize and sharpen is all you need to do, and you might as well do it in JPEG.

Finally, I do find Capture One very fast in use. It's multi-threaded, and you can do several things at once. It's also very easy to copy various settings, or all, from one image to a number of others. In other words, you can work in batches very easily.

The upshot of this is that apart from upload times, which are obviously longer, it takes no more time, perhaps less, to work in RAW than in JPEG.

G

Thanks for that, George, all your points duly noted and into the mix!

I mostly agree with George's comments... but have some other things to throw in

When I started RAW, I took a mix of JPG and RAW, saving the RAW for the "special" images. However, after several "aaarghh" shots taken in JPG I am now fully RAW. Even for eBay images - it's easier to have one controllable workflow

As to converting from RAW to JPG with Capture One - this is what I've been doing 99% of the time. For some of my best images I tried 16-bit TIFF, and actually it didn't make much difference for my workflow - probably because C1 gave an output that was 90% correct anyway, so there was little chance of problems in the image histogram because of much messing around.

However, I've had a few images where I've had some level of colour artifacts, even at the high quality output JPG. Since I generally save the PSD file (because I always edit non-destructively in PS, using layers), I'm moving towards 8-bit TIFF, into PSD and deleting the TIFF. Capture One allows me (like most others) to save the RAW setting, so I can easily reconstruct the TIFF again.

And yes, each RAW convertor has its own characteristics, almost like film - both in terms of image quality (detail vs smooth areas), and dynamic range interpretation. I try every RAW convertor I can, but I still come back to Capture One - because I can't beat the image quality. For some images, there's little difference between the three contenders, sometimes PS-CS2 is just more convenient, but generally I find the whole process of preparing and outputting much, much quicker in C1. As a consequence, I've found that I do very, very little post-processing in Photoshop now.

To answer your question about where to do the white balance correction - I would say definitely in the RAW convertor You could set up a test and compare histograms, and I reckon the straight RAW output will be better (and therefore suffer less problems in colour posterization).

JPG is great for general work. Very quick, very convenient. But personally, I won't be giving up RAW.

As long as you get results that you're happy with!!

Matt