The wonders of RAW

Well, having finally parted with the money for Phase One Capture One LE, I am now getting to grips with it properly.

I am amazed to find how much detail there is to be recovered in pictures that look so horribly over-exposed that normally you wouldn't give them a second glance.

Indeed, I even started undeleting pictures that I had thought were beyond hope.

I am now wondering whether the policy of slightly under-exposing to avoid blowing out highlights is right. RAW seems to reach parts that JPEG can't even imagine.

So thanks to that Apostle of RAW, Matt, for so actively promoting RAW itself, and Capture One. I agree that once you get into it, the C1 work-flow is fast and easy, and the only downside compared to JPEG is the longer initial download time. But that's not much of an issue.

G

LOL! Thanks George Glad you're getting to grips with it all

The only other problem is the exponential storage issue... I am wrestling with RAW, TIFF, and PSD files in the gigabytes per month!

Regarding exposure - you can claw back shadows, but only to a point. A full half of the values from the 12-bits of the RAW is in the first f-stop, a quarter of values in the next stop, and so on. By the time you get down to the shadows you don't have much to play with.
Ideally you should expose so the histogram just touches the right of the preview graph. That way you get the most information. However, this isn't always possible... but as you say, you can get an amazing amount of info from apparently blown highlights

Matt

Of course, I should have said that the only downside (APART from the exponential storage issue) is......

Thankfully, hard disks and DVDs are now pretty cheap, compared to two or three years ago.

G

That's why you get noise in the shadows when you try to pull too much out. The trick, as mentioned, is to get as close to the right side of the histogram as you can without losing highlights. RAW capture is linear, not logarythmic, so the previously metioned first F stop is half the range.