Shooting in RAW

Should shots in RAW need more sharpening than shots in JPEG?
Or, have I messed up?

I went back to photograph the cricket in the park and decided to shoot in RAW as everyone tells me that's the way to go. But, I've noticed they are less sharp than the shots I took a week ago.

I used the same method of focusing, but the light wasn't as good and I had to use a wide open aperture and a higher ISO (800) to get reasonable shutter speed.

So, did I just not get them focused as well, or is this normal for RAW and will a little work bring them out?

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Getting there! Thanks to you guys

Pentax K10d, *istDL, Kit lens ( 18-55mm ), 50mm f1.7 lens, Tamron 70-300mm lens, Prinzflex 70-162 manual lens, Various old flashes.

RAW is an unfettled image Ted. It allows you to manually control the amount of noise reduction & sharpening etc that you apply to the image.

A jpeg comes out of the camera with these already applied according to the type of output selected. Whilst this may be ok for many shots, it treats all shots the same whereas you can use your judgement & the considerably more powerful software & hardware that a PC (or mac) provides you with.
It takes practice to get it right, but will yield better results than jpeg when you master it.

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My Flickr

Here's a case in point.



I'm still going through the shots, so they may not all be bad, but everyone I opened is soft

I used auto focus to focus on the wicket, then switched to manual focus to lock it on that point. ( Although, this one may have been different as it all happened in a rush ).

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Getting there! Thanks to you guys

Pentax K10d, *istDL, Kit lens ( 18-55mm ), 50mm f1.7 lens, Tamron 70-300mm lens, Prinzflex 70-162 manual lens, Various old flashes.

Thanks RR

I'll practice some more.

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Getting there! Thanks to you guys

Pentax K10d, *istDL, Kit lens ( 18-55mm ), 50mm f1.7 lens, Tamron 70-300mm lens, Prinzflex 70-162 manual lens, Various old flashes.

You could try shooting RAW+JPEG and see the differences?

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My Photobucket

That is to be expected. All RAW images have had no processing applied. You will almost always need to apply some sharpening to them during PP.

This can usually be applied at the import stage and may only require slight modification.

Don't forget also that an out-of-camera JPG image has only 8 bit colour depth compared to a RAW's 12 bit (I think, maybe it's 14 or more). In any event, there is much more detail to be recovered from a RAW file than a JPG.

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Peter E Smith

My flickr Photostream

After all the adjustements in CS4 i usually use the unsharp mask tool to sharpen.As Peter says only a little sharpening is usually needed.

I've never shot in JPEG but i would assume that the camera would make a whole host of adjustments to the image before we see it.

Thanks guys, you've put my mind at rest a little.

I was beginning to think it had been a wasted evening, ( although it was worth going just to watch the cricket; these kids are good ).

Now I just need to spend some time with Silkypics and figure out how to use it properly.

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Getting there! Thanks to you guys

Pentax K10d, *istDL, Kit lens ( 18-55mm ), 50mm f1.7 lens, Tamron 70-300mm lens, Prinzflex 70-162 manual lens, Various old flashes.

I am noticing from this image that you have a slight back focus issue. If you look slightly in the background you'll see that it is a bit sharper than the men themselve. Just out of interest, are you using multi or centre point focusing. If you are using centre point on a fast lense you may not have this problem. In my experience, i have found there to be no obvious sharpening difference between jpeg and raw.

You are shooting fast moving objects, and compared to other cameras, pentax lags in focus speed a little

My thoughts too...I think the shot here is slightly out of focus rather than having an issue with sharpness.

As others have mentioned RAW always needs sharpening whereas if you "tweak" the in-camera options .JPGs can be fine "as captured". Personally I apply sharpening twice - a little in ACR (capture shrpening) & then I use the photoshop plug-in "photokit" that tailors the sharpening to the output size/type

simon

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OK guys.
So, some of the shots will be out of focus, not too surprised at that with dull lighting and fast moving targets and others might need more tweaking than I'm used to doing because I normally shoot in JPEG.

I generally use centre focusing and I have it set to AF-S to stop the camera "hunting" for the focus.

I'll go through all the images tonight, ( only chose some at random last night ), and see what's what

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Getting there! Thanks to you guys

Pentax K10d, *istDL, Kit lens ( 18-55mm ), 50mm f1.7 lens, Tamron 70-300mm lens, Prinzflex 70-162 manual lens, Various old flashes.