Post Processing - to do it or not?

[pxl8]

Originally Posted by Fourwings

The RAW converter software supplied with most cameras is very basic and extremely limited in what it can do, I don't know about Canon but I have both Fuji raw-converter LE & Nikon capture 6 & both of these are slow & far too basic to hold your interest for long!

Canon's DPP is one of the better tools around for dealing with the image data. I've not used Fuji's or Nikon's but DPP compares with C1Pro for control of the image data and certainly offers much greater control of the tonal curve on the raw data (not the 8bit curve).

I can really reccomend RAW Shooter essentials, it's brilliant, by far the best bit of freeware you will ever download - go get it Boddie - you won't regret it!

I actually dislike RSE and RSP. I found the results to be quite murky and the Auto Exposure seems to heavily favour fill light which leads to very flat results (tho perhaps better for portrait work). It does have a reputation for the most accurate white balance tool - if you're shooting pure grey objects under a neutral light then it will get it right every time! But perhaps the worst thing about RSE/P for me is the awful noise reduction/sharpning system they've used which leaves horrid artifacts around edges and gives a very unnatural processed feel to everything - as if it's been put through an very mild oil paint filter.

I did a comparasion of RSE, DPP, C1Pro, and Adobe Camera Raw not so long ago - this shows how each app read the same raw file.





DPP was the closest in terms of contrast and colour balance to the scene as I remembered it. I spent a good couple of days working with all 4 apps to see which one was the easiest to work with. I was actually surprised that DPP consistently gave the best results as before I'd started I was a die hard C1Pro user.

Of course the test image is just a starting point and you can, with varying degrees of effort, get almost identical results from all of them. It was how much work I had to put in that helped me decide to use DPP as my converter of choice.

I think it ultimately comes down to personal taste and how you like to work more than anything. Other factors may have more weight such as being able to tag images, speed of processing, etc.

[BartonFlyer]

I've steered away from using RAW fornat on the basis of it eating CF cards! If your immediate action is to convert to a jpg after some processing, then what have you actually lost by saving in camera as the best quality jpg, with the camera set to minimal sharpening, saturation, contrast etc?

btw pxl8 - as you use PSP X, have you used it to read your raw files directly - it certainly supports minolta raw .mrw, but I have no idea as to it's fidelity compared to any other raw convertors.

[pxl8]

Originally Posted by BartonFlyer

I've steered away from using RAW fornat on the basis of it eating CF cards! If your immediate action is to convert to a jpg after some processing, then what have you actually lost by saving in camera as the best quality jpg, with the camera set to minimal sharpening, saturation, contrast etc?

Raw is 12bits per channel, jpg is only 8 so for a start you've got 4096 shades of a colour, not 256. But the real difference is how those shades are distributed. With jpg you might only have 8 or 16 shades in the shadow areas (the data isn't linear) which means if you've underexposed the shot there's no data there to rescue. Because raw has that extra data you can also get much finer control over tonal ranges esp in the highlight areas.

The other advantages are white balance and all the other processing the camera will bake into the jpeg and can't be undone easily.

The workflow I gave was only for web - for print I'll stay with 16bit tiff as long as possible.

btw pxl8 - as you use PSP X, have you used it to read your raw files directly - it certainly supports minolta raw .mrw, but I have no idea as to it's fidelity compared to any other raw convertors.

It was a non-starter - very slow and no real control in the Smart Photo tool.

[digi]

I always shoot in RAW, in the past too many of my images were wasted by over/under exposure but raw being the digital negative allows you to recover those images that if they had been taken in jpg would have been deleted.

I find ACR better for aviation images and Rawshooter better for wildlife.

As for workflow I think its something each of us developes to suit our taste in images,

Mine is as follows

Adjust exposure and white balance in raw
convert to tif
straighten if required
crop
resize the image
sharpen with smartsharpen or USM
adjust brightness and contrast
check histogram
save to jpg