David writes:
I shoot everything in RAW. It's the snapshots where I most need the capabilities RAW offers -- they're often shot in a hurry and when I'm not paying the most attention. Using Bibble Pro, I can "batch adjust" -- set parameters for a group of photos shot under similar conditions; getting me a considerable improvement over what the camera does for me, with quite low time investment. And can rescue quite badly messed up pictures, without having to invoke Photoshop and the full-blown restoration workflow.
now I'm not having a go at you David nor am I criticizing you in the least, but this is an interesting phenomenon.
A lot of pros used to shoot transparency - I blame this on the fool graphic designers who couldn't cope with negatives and thus demanded everything on slide.
Two things about E6, of course it had to be bang on with exposure, and a downside, it was a contrasty medium and thus a lot of information from the scene was lost, then lost again when it went into a printing stage
Negative had a far lower contrast, capturing a lot more variation in light values from a scene, and printed more tones .. of course again the graphic designers in the print industry found this confounding - in fact, many were unaware that negatives could in fact be scanned as positives.
It led to an elitism of sorts among amateurs too, who only bought 'pro' E6 film (willy-nilly, no batch numbers considered, as long as it was marked 'pro') and made virtuous remarks about the odd image they managed to expose correctly - proclaiming how accurate one had to be to shoot slide
Now we're in the digi-age and RAW is kinda like the negative.. but betterer - well, so we're told. It allows a heck of a lot of chance captures to be redeemed with software manipulation.
Jpeg shooters are frowned on (by some) as shooting an 'inferior format' (remembering a jpeg is actually a bitmap that is compressed by the jpeg compression algorithm) -
- yet a jpeg shooter HAS to get the exposure right or they risk missing a usable shot. a lot more skill is required, as was the case with E6 to get usable results, but it captures a far better range of tones than E6 did, so it's like a hybrid of E6's accurate exposure requirements, but with the C41 tonal range - so minor errors in exposure still yield acceptable results.
furthermore, setting the jpeg quality to the highest setting, lowest compression, will produce an image as good as any printer, any eye, any evaluation could possibly want.
downsides? high dynamic range composites aren't possible with just one shot.
Just as with a scanned negative at a couple of different settings can be recompiled to reduce the contrast between scenes in light areas and dark, a RAW can have a few differing exposures extracted and recompiled for an HDR shots..
Me, I shoot jpegs purely because I don't like spending time in image programs. I'd rather be shooting and doing minor batched gross image adjustments than tinkering with curves and the like.
I can see a very good reason to be shooting RAW under some circumstances, but I treat it just as I would when I bought film - do I need E6 or negative, what are my intentions, what do I want the final image to look like?
it' rare I switch to RAW, but it's something I do quickly and almost without thinking when confronted with certain scenes that will need HDR adjustments
my 2c Karl
