At 07:29 PM 12/12/2002 -0500, you wrote:
Jody, its very easy to shoot weddings with the D100. Let me explain digital file formats first.did some test shots with my new d100. i will be doing some weddigns with it and printing out the photos to give to the customers on my epson 1280. (hopefully) i have up until now been taking tiff file photos.
The Nikon D100 records 3 channels of color in 12 bits of color depth for 6 million pixels. Computers are by their nature based on 8 bit chunks of data. Thus it takes 16 bits (2 8 bit chunks) to hold 12 bits of data.
A TIFF is an uncompressed (which means it hasn't been shrank mathmatically to a smaller size) format that uses 16 bits (2 bytes) per color channel per pixel. A TIFF from the D100 is around 37 megabytes of storage. They are very slow to read and write from the card and you can only get about 7 shots on a 256 megabyte card.
A JPEG on the other hand is an 8 bit only data format with a mathematical compression to shrink the file down. Since we are starting in 8 bit, the file size is instantly halved and then thats compressed. A typical JPEG in the Fine compression (not very much) is around 2 megabytes. You can store around 75 or so Fine JPEGs on a 256 mbyte card.
However you pay a double edged price for using JPEGs. First before I go and say this, to many eyes, the difference will be imperceptible. Your customer will most certainly not have a trained eye to look for the differences. Your printer only works with 8 bit data any way, so before you print, you are going to have to reduce to 8 bit (which is still 16 million color values at the high end of what the eye can see any way)..
The three color channels, Red, Green, and Blue are stored in separate values. The camera records 12 bits of color data or a possible range of reds from 0 to 4095 (2^12th power) or 4096 total color values. To work with a number the size of 4096, a computer requires two bytes of computer memory (16 bits) which is what makes the TIFF so very big. However 8 bit files like JPEG and outputing to your Epson means that each color has 256 values per color (0-255). The range of colors per channel has been reduced. Like I said above, very few people can perceive the difference so its not that big of a deal.
Secondly JPEG's compression works very well, however to work as well as it does, it has to sacrifice some color data. Lets say you have a photo of someone in a blue dress and you pick 4 pixels of that dress to look at. The 4 pixels may very well have slightly different color values. When JPEG compresses, it looks for colors that are near each other and changes them to one color and stores the data with 4 blocks of the same color which cuts the file size down since it only has to store the one color. Wiht the D100 in JPEG fine mode this is barely noticeable to the trained eye and nearly impossible for an untrained eye to spot.
So far, neither TIFF or JPEG has offered us the best choice. JPEG has a lot of advantages, but many people don't want to loose the data in the initial compression and color range reduction. So what do we do?
The D100 supports a mode called RAW or NEF. In this case, the camera stores exactly what the CCD sees in an unprocessed manner. These files are about 9 megabytes in size and you can get about 25 on a 256 card. They are faster that TIFFS and much smaller, yet they are not compressed with a lossy method and it preserves all 12 bits of data for later use. NEFs, since they are unprocessed allow the computer to go back later and change things like color balance, sharpness, and tone outside of the camera, a great feature.
The drawback? First there are two, one thats easy to fix and one that costs money. The D100 for some reason has compression on for NEFs as the default. While this will squeeze more NEFs on a card, it takes like 30 seconds to write each one. You will need to go into your menu and turn off compression so you don't miss any shots while the camera is waiting to write to the CF card.
The other drawback is you need software to process the RAW NEF files into JPEGs or TIFFs for Photoshop to use. There are three main packages for working with RAW files. Nikon View 5.1 is a free program from Nikon that provides a simple plugin for photoshop that lets photoshop read NEF files. You don't get much control with this option, but hey, its free. The other two involve Nikon Capture 3.5 ($150 from Nikon) or Bibble ($99 shareware, www.bibblelabs.com). Both will allow you to manipulate your raw files to get the very best image out of your camera possible.
There is no reason to shoot in camera TIFFs since the Free plugin exists. If you don't want JPEG and its issues, shoot NEFs (turn compression off for speed) and you will get the results you want.
However, back to your original issue. Even shooting NEFs, you are only going to get 25 shots to a card. When I shoot a wedding, I take a laptop along so I can dump my cards as I go along. I also have several 256 mb cards. Four would be a good quantity. Thats going to give you 100 shots if you don't dump. The 1Gbyte Microdrive was a good suggestion, however they are subject to impact damage and I personally steer away from them.
My first advice is to shoot some Fine JPEGs and see how you like them. Then try the NEF files. Both Capture 3.5 and Bibble are available in trial versions so you can try before you buy.
Thanks,
Rob
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Rob Miracle
Photographic Miracles
203 Carpenter Brook Dr.
Cary, NC 27519
http://www.photo-miracles.com
