How much data is hiddenin RAW??

Ever wonder just how much data you can recover from RAW?
I personally haven't made th effort to find out, but today I made a mistake that allowed me to be pleasantly surprised.

Some huge mushrooms popped over the time I was at work today, and for whatever reason my first shot of the nasty thing was wildly over exposed. (The next shot focused on the same spot was excellent, go figure...)

Anyway, I don't want to start a discussion of which is better RAW vs JPEG... both have their benefits and that has been done to death.
I simply found it interesting that I was able to get a reasonable image from the original RAW even though it was so far gone. I have not seen a strong example of how much data can be recovered before.


Now it will not win any awards, it still has some burned out portions, and I would probably still trash it but I was surprised at how much data can be pulled from RAW.

In SilkyPix I dropped the exposure by two stops. It did a lot for recovery, but left the bottom edges of the mushroom rather blue. I saved a second image dropped by one stop, and merged the two.
The following is the before and after.

Even more amazing with something like an FujiFilm S3 or S5 (or an S20Pro)

HERESY!!!!! BURN the HERETIC!!!!!!

Well, it is true...

*runs like hell...*

The amount of recovery possible on the S3 etc is amazing. But the trade off is a much lower real pixel count. Yeah, I know we shouldn't be pixel counters, but there is no such thing as a free lunch.

I was browsing through my photo collection and found one that my other half took with her S20Pro. When the Super CCD SR goes wrong it goes horribly wrong. This particular image has green clipping so bad that when you reduce the exposure parts of the image 'glow' 100% green. Looks really odd, gives the plants and lichen that were blown out an eerie 'radioactive' look.

One amazing this about the SR sensors is the complete lack of chroma noise, it is all luminance (and that can get bad on the S20Pro's sensor).

Now, this shot is one I took so posting it is not a problem

Before:



After:



That is 2.5 stops recovery and some fill light.

I actually have one shot with detail recoverable with parts of the image overexposed by 4 stops!

Now if a picture needs that much fixing it is not really worth keeping. It is not my shot so I can't upload it.

If I was shooting weddings professionally I'd be sorely tempted by an S3 or S5.

EDIT:

I've had the sky blown out a lot less than that with my K10D and it is never recoverable. It completely lacks tonal range and becomes three bands of blue, cyan and white.

Highlights on the K10 seem to clip very suddenly.

As with high def video I always protect the highlights and then with Raw the K10 is superb for bringing out details in the shadows. Or so I have found so far.

Yeah, it is the opposite when I shoot with the S20. I have to get the shadow details and then I can bring back all the highlights. I have to work backwards with my K10D which can be a little awkward. I guess that happens when you change sensor type.

You can take this a lot further by opening up two (or more) layers in Photoshop (or similar) one with the exposure adjusted for the highlights (usu the sky) another adjusted for the shadows and blend the two layers together, so you end up with a pic with a greater tonal range, but even the 12 bit depth of a RAW file has limits.

This can be taken even further with HDR (high dynamic range) photography where you take a number of shots with different exposures to cover the wide range of tones in your subject, then blend these in Photoshop or another good program is Photomatix.

The reason I am posting this in this Forum is that the new Firmware for the K10D (maybe the K100 too, I don't know) has been expanded to up to 5 frames with up to 2 stops between frames, which means the camera will record a massive 10 stop range over the 5 frames, to make use of this technique.

Here is a link, if the moderators don't mind, to Stuart Little's forum where the members are currently experimenting with this method.

http://www.littlephotoshopforum.com/forum35/1586.html

If you see any pics posted by ChrisJ on this forum, thats me and were all taken with either a *ist DS or a K10D.

Flickr also has a HDR group, some of which show what you shouldn't do with HDR. or just do a Google search for 'HDR'

Cheers Chris

I tried photomatix and hated it, I found the results very poor and it made the image 10x noisier (without tone mapping).

I don't have a version of photoshop which can do masking and blend layers properly so HDR is not an option for me, nor is exposure blending.

If it can't be done in Lightroom I'm not going to touch it, for now.

Hi Tyr

Thats because you're looking at a 32 bit image on an 8 bit monitor, it's the equivalent to looking at a beautiful picture through the bottom of a milk bottle!. Not until the pic has been re-mapped will the 8 bit monitor be able to make sense of the mass of data that's overwhelming it.

Chris

Photoshop and Lightroom convert on the fly giving you a suitable 'preview'.

I may give it an other go but even with the exported image imported into Lightroom I didn't like it.

Lastly, I chose a bad set to combine as the branches on one edge were completely mixed up.

Artizen HDR does a great job for merging and tone mapping. Like Silkypix it has a user interface which will take some getting used to but it works very well.