On Fri, May 14, 2010 01:30, karl shah-jenner wrote: > 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. Also the printers were much more used to dealing with slides. > 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 Yep. > 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 <grin>! > 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. It gives more scope for post-processing, and in particular it tolerates over-exposure much better than a jpeg; so "kinda like" seems fine to me; not identical of course. > 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. It definitely takes different approaches, and skills, to produce first-rate results from jpegs. It's harder in some ways. > downsides? high dynamic range composites aren't possible with just one > shot. It seems entirely likely, to me, that the mental effort that goes into getting the jpeg just right may somewhat detract from the effort available to get the best shots overall. Certainly any time spent fine-tuning the exposure at the last moment before shooting (in excess of what a RAW shooter spends) will lose you some shots. > 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. And that's as legitimate a reason as any other; each photographer gets to establish their own workflow. > 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 Using both sensibly has to focus on developing the habit of recognizing and responding to the need to switch one way or the other. The fact that I'm an amateur, i.e. not producing hundreds of shots multiple times a week, may well be a factor in my being willing to do post-processing on everything. Then again I know enough about printing to not consider a straight-out-of-the-camera jpeg an adequate work product for anything beyond snapshots. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
