RAW mode on S45

[Ring]

I noticed some S45 owners shoot in RAW to be able to make post-shooting adjustments. I shot a bunch of pics in RAW my new S45 (in P mode). But when I open them with Zoombrowser's RAW converter and select S45, it will let me change the white balance or the photo effect mode, but not contrast, color saturation, sharpness, or anything else. Those selectors are grayed out. If the first two are all I can change, it's not worth it to me to save in RAW. Can anyone confirm that this is the way it is with S45 RAW?

[Guillermo Freige]

Ring:
You need to change the Photo Effect Mode to Custom Effect first. After that, the other fields become active. It mimics camera fuctionality. If you set your camera in Custom, you don't need to change Photo Effect during conversion, so it's a good idea to use that camera mode to skip a step during conversions if you shoot in RAW

[Ring]

Ah, I see that now -- thanks! I had hoped it might be possible to do post-shot exposure compensation via this means. That's my biggest need; e.g., when you have a backlighting situation and it's hard to tell how much to manually stop it down. In experimenting, the only equivalent I could find in the RAW conversion process was setting the contrast at low, but that didn't make much of a difference. It's looking like I'm going to be using the highest resolution/lowest compression JPEG as my standard recording format. I've got enough room for RAW pics on my 512MB flash card, but I don't see the benefit (for me).

[Guillermo Freige]

Ring:
The S45 RAW format has mainly 2 advantages: WB correction during conversion (if your camera setting were wrong during the taking or the AWB was fooled), and, mainly, the 12-bit colordepth instead of the standard 8-bit one present in JPEG. It lacks the 3rd and probably most useful RAW feature present in DSLR RAW formats, exposure compensation, but if you keep the highlights well exposed and not blown, most of the corrections can be done during postprocessing (in PS or another 16-bit enabled photoediting program) if you save the image as 16-bit TIFF (to keep the RAW 12-bit information intact) and then make all the curves, levels and other corrections in 16-bit space, before converting the final image to 8-bit and save it to JPEG.

[Ring]

Thanks for the education. If I can't do exposure compensation on RAW pics from my S45, RAW's value for me drops considerably. Although there might be some situations where I want to save the 12 bit color depth, in which case I'll follow your advice on how to do that.

[Guillermo Freige]

In fact you can use exposure compensation with RAW, but not if you use any conversor using the Canon libraries (as the included software or BreezeBrowser). You need to use Photoshop 7 + CameraRAW plugin or Photoshop CS. I've used Photoshop CS with my S50 (the S50 isn't supported in PS7, only in CS) and I was able to recover a "lost" picture using exp.compensation and AdobeRGB colorspace.

Check this post for a "before&after" comparison:
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=19845

[thepilot]

Thanks a lot Guillermo.
As a newbie to this site and after messing about with some RAW shots last night, that was going to be the subject of my first post!

Cheers
Iain.