Learning RAW

[HoustonTexan]

I apologize if this has been asked before, but I'm in the early stages of learning how to use the RAW format. I'm shooting with a 300D and using Adobe CS. Now what?

I've looked at my images in RAW but don't know what to do next other than fiddle with the various settings. I know there has to be a more defined approach but I'm not sure where to start.

Is there a place on-line where I can find a RAW tutorial of sorts? Any advice in knowing what right and wrong about processing in the RAW format would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much.

[deezeljuice]

I'm with you, houstontexan. I'm getting pretty good at fiddlin', but I would like to actually know what I'm doing, if you know what I mean... I would like to hear what some of the Photoshop pros have to say about this.

[HoustonTexan]

Alright, Deez...sounds like we are in this together. :)

[mkatona]

Your software that came with the camera does and okay job for starters. Read the manual and help menus for converting from RAW. Fiddilin' only works to a point and then you need to dedicate some time to learning the software.
Go to the Luminos Landscape and check out the links. I haven't found much better for ways around in photoshop.
Good luck

[eric1]

hey guys,
i don't think PS CS has support for the 300D yet. i thought you had to use the canon crap, or get the
C1 rebel. let me know how it goes, i'm struglin'
with the raw software too.

thanks,
eric

[HoustonTexan]

I was able to use CS to open a RAW image from my 300D.

[GenEOS]

There is LOTS to learn about using RAW files. But the number one thing you have all done right is the desiscion to use them. It is the most important issue when it comes to getting the most out of your camera.

I have not upgraded to PS-CS yet, I am running PS7 with the Adobe RAW add-on. I will try to summarize the use of the software.

Shooting RAW and converting with CS or Adobe RAW, or Breeze Browser, etc... allows you to control the image almost completly.

I find that I always adjust the exposure to tweek it a tad, sometimes a few tads. It gives you the ability to adjust +/- 2 stops. Can't do this with a jpeg.

You can also adjust darks and whites, sharpness (although unsharp masks in PS work about the best for sharpening) and temperature, plus a few others.

You ask, now what? Well, converting the image is the first step in the PS image handling process. If you are looking for a super nice photo to print in large format, then you will use the RAW conversion as a starting point.

Here is my workflow in a nut shell, for your information. This is how I handle a typical shoot.

1.) Shoot all images in RAW, takes more disk space, but well worth it.

2.) Download to my directory structure under "RAW"

3.) I then use Breeze Browser (an independent software) to browse the RAW files and delete the poor images, or duplicates.

4.) I then extract the embedded JPEGs from the files left in "RAW" directory.

5.) I then look through the JPEG's to select the files I wish to convert using the PS RAW conversion.

6.) I then use Photoshop to convert these files from RAW and save them to a master TIFF directory or as a high resolution JPEG (if sending in to the paper).

I hope this helped a little or gives you a better idea of how RAW is used...

[HoustonTexan]

Daniel,

Thanks for the reply and the helpful information.

I guess my biggest thing is I don't know what to start tweaking with first, if anything. I guess I'm just going on what looks good to my eye?

[defordphoto]

It's a learning process. It won't happen overnight. Take your time and have fun with it. The nice thing is you'll always have the original RAW file to go back to. RAW is awesome, but JPEG has its place too and is widely used by pros and amateurs alike. You're going to learn more in the next 6 months than you've ever learned in photography. The control you possess over your photos is very powerful. You can do whatever you want. Enjoy!

[HoustonTexan]

What exactly are you looking for when adjusting the "shadows" level?

[GenEOS]

I use that a lot on shots at high asa and underexposed due to poor lighting and need for fast shutter speeds. It can help take out a lot of noise.

From the other comment in this thread, a lot of photogs use jpegs, but I still shoot all RAW files. If I need a quick and dirty jpeg to send in, I just extract the jpeg from the raw file and transmit it in quickly.

I look at it this way. It is much better to have the better file, than to wish you did. I got bit one time by shooting jpeg. I shot a picture I really wanted to tweak and make some better enlargements from. I could still do it, but it wasn't the best it could be.

The only instance I could see myself swithcing to a lower compression jpeg would be in the case of a natural disaster , accident or even..... terrorist attack, when I needed to get the maximum shots from the CF cards I had on me.

[theoldmoose]

There are a couple of nice tutorials on http://www.luminous-landscape.com, one of them called "Instant Photoshop" and a couple of others there, that should give anyone a nice head start on setting up a digital workflow they are comfortable with.

Don't be super-critical, or you'll spend so much time on tweaking in PS (or similar photo editing program) you'll miss all the great photo ops around you :-)

One thing that seems to be overlooked by a lot of tutorials, etc. is the importance of getting in the habit of burning a CD of your 'digital negatives' (your RAW files, or original in-camera JPEGS) before you touch them with an editor. It's all too easy to accidentally overwrite a file, especially a JPEG, and if you've already erased/formatted your CF card, you can lose the original forever.

In fact, digital photography seems to encourage folks to snap so many pictures that it tends to create thorny issues over how to keep track of all those images, stored across possibly hundreds of media. I like Archive Creator, by PictureFlow (google for it). It will create indexes for you across multiple CDs/DVDs, etc. I've also heard good things about ACDSee.

Just make sure you archive your original shots, and also any 16-bit photo-shop corrected images (with layers), before you flatten, re-size and sharpen (final sharpening should be done *after* re-sizing) for printing (if you like, of course, you can archive various print sizes you've produced, as well). That way, you can quickly retrieve either your original, or your tweaked end-product, if that's suitable, to make that 5x7 for your office desk, or whatever.

For archiving PS files with layers, DVDs are roomier. A good size PS file with layers can consume several tens of megabytes, easily. A CD would only be able to store maybe 10 shots. A DVD can store about two rolls (70 or more shots) easily, even if they are hi-res scans of slides. You can get a nice 4x DVD burner these days for about $100. Check out techbargains.com for the best deals from reputable suppliers.

[BobbyC]

theoldmoose wrote:
One thing that seems to be overlooked by a lot of tutorials, etc. is the importance of getting in the habit of burning a CD of your 'digital negatives' (your RAW files, or original in-camera JPEGS) before you touch them with an editor. It's all too easy to accidentally overwrite a file, especially a JPEG, and if you've already erased/formatted your CF card, you can lose the original forever.

This is the best piece of advise I've seen yet. There's nothing worse than finding out that great shot is gone forever.

theoldmoose wrote:
Just make sure you archive your original shots, and also any 16-bit photo-shop corrected images (with layers), before you flatten, re-size and sharpen (final sharpening should be done *after* re-sizing) for printing (if you like, of course, you can archive various print sizes you've produced, as well). That way, you can quickly retrieve either your original, or your tweaked end-product, if that's suitable, to make that 5x7 for your office desk, or whatever.

I do have to disagree somewhat about the save different sizes comment, I believe that is overkill and a waste of time in burning and a waste of storage. Save the original with all the layers and adjustments and then just crop as needed at print time. If you have made all the adjustments you would ever make to the image, I would go ahead and flatten it as well and save as a tiff as it is much more efficient.

[theoldmoose]

BobbyC wrote:

I do have to disagree somewhat about the save different sizes comment, I believe that is overkill and a waste of time in burning and a waste of storage. Save the original with all the layers and adjustments and then just crop as needed at print time. If you have made all the adjustments you would ever make to the image, I would go ahead and flatten it as well and save as a tiff as it is much more efficient.





I don't bother archiving different sizes, but some folks do, so I threw that in there for consideration.

I've recently read a piece on whether to flatten before archive or not, and now can't recall where I've seen it. May have something to do with some folks doing sharpening in three discrete steps, IIRC. May be that if you follow that route, you want to keep your layers, so that you can do effective pre-sizing sharpening, or similar. I'll see if I can dig that up again.

[hammerdown]

Super-Newbie here!

I've just used Canon's File Viewer Utility to get some RAW shots off my camera. This program has several drop down boxes for adjusting exposure, white balance, contrast, color, etc. I assume one should take advantage of these settings before eporting to PS for more tweaking?

There are several choices when it comes to extracting from RAW to TIFF or JPEG. TIFF has 8 bit or 16 bit, and JPEG has 4 quality settings. Is TIFF better than JPEG when sending to PS for further editing? Also, is there a standard for pixels/inch for saving and printing?

Hammer

[ilya]

hammerdown wrote:
Super-Newbie here!

I've just used Canon's File Viewer Utility to get some RAW shots off my camera. This program has several drop down boxes for adjusting exposure, white balance, contrast, color, etc. I assume one should take advantage of these settings before eporting to PS for more tweaking?

There are several choices when it comes to extracting from RAW to TIFF or JPEG. TIFF has 8 bit or 16 bit, and JPEG has 4 quality settings. Is TIFF better than JPEG when sending to PS for further editing? Also, is there a standard for pixels/inch for saving and printing?

Hammer

Hey super-newbie
The Canon FVU does give you ability to awkwardly and slowly process RAW images, and to tweak white balance, exposure, contrast, color tone, etc. So if you must use FVU, you should take advantage of at least the white balance setting, and do the rest in PS. There is a lot of information on Raw processing posted on this forum, and also in the software forum, and a couple good articles in luminous-landscape.

The best alternative to the FVU or some of the other raw processors like breezebrowser and CE is Photoshop CS. Its an integrated, and significantly more powerful way to process RAW images the way the photo gods intended.

Similar to RAW, a Tiff image does not throw away any image information to generate a file - its lossless compression, while Jpeg is quite "lossy". For average everyday applications, you won't notice the difference (this may be blasphemy to some). Tiffs are big, bigger then raw files. that's a big disadvantage if your workflow includes storing the original raw images, as well as Tiffs.

A 16-bit per channel image provides finer distinctions in color, but it can have twice the file size of an 8-bit image. Again, not noticeable for every-day apps. ALso, PS versions prior to CS provide limited color and tonal correction commands for 16-bit, you kind of have to jump thru hoops.

In any case, do some more reading on this forum, and others quoted on these topics. If you're brand new to all this, my reco is 1) upgrade to Photoshop CS (if you have ver 7 its "only" $170); 2) shoot Raw; 3) save Jpegs; 4) use 8-bit. As you gain experience with all that, your workflow and technique will evolve as well to cover the finer workflow techniques.

Ilya

[theoldmoose]

JPEGs, mostly untinkered with, will look OK. But you need to remember that with only 8-bits per channel, you have relatively little overhead to work with, if you want to make any contrast or other corrections.

Generally accepted vision perception practices indicate that most folks don't distinguish much beyond about 64 levels of brightness. That means that an 8-bit per channel image has about 2 bits (or stops) of overhead. Unfortunately, that can get chewed up pretty quick if you start making adjustments to the photo. Also remember, if you are looking at a luminance histogram, that the individual red/blue/green channels may already be 'blown out', even though the grey level histogram doesn't indicate this.

The 300D has a 12-bit sensor, and A-to-D circuitry. It's a shame to only bother saving 8 of those bits to start with (or soon after), especially if you want/need to do any image manipulation after the fact.

Rather than shooting RAW, and converting to JPEG (to save disk space? most machines these days have far more disk space than most folks know what to do with), I would advise that if you've gone to the trouble of shooting RAW in the first place, that you convert and save in 16-bit TIFF, and submit that to PhotoShop for editing. You can then save any intermediate or final work, short of re-sizing for printing or publishing on the web, in PhotoShop's native .PSD file format. You can then do a final re-sizing and sharpening, and then save as .GIF for the web, or JPEG for prints, if you like.

If you don't flatten the image layers before saving, the .PSD files can take up fair amount of disk space, but gigabytes of drive space these days are cheap (and you are archiving to CD or DVD, aren't you?). In fact, you may be more concerned about having enough RAM in your machine, to avoid a lot of disk swapping and thrashing when you have the image(s) open in PhotoShop. 512MB of RAM is OK, 768MB is better, and if your motherboard can handle it, 1GB would be even nicer.

The RAW conversion software that comes with the camera is slow. For $49, you can go to http://www.pictureflow.com and get the Digital Rebel edition of Capture 1 DSLR. It's highly rated, and provides an interactive preview, and background queued RAW file conversion. The RAW conversion is not a whole lot faster than the bundled software, but you don't have to wait on it while you work on other images. I haven't upgraded to PhotoShop CS yet, so I don't know how C1DSLR stacks up against the CS 300D RAW support. Maybe someone else can weigh in on that subject.

It is true that version 7 of PS has limited 16-bit functionality. At least the more important up-front things, like levels and curves, can be done in 16-bit mode though, so you can do a number of operations that would normally cut into your image's overhead, then convert to 8-bit, and apply the finishing touches. Not as good as doing everything in 16-bit, but at least better than starting with an 8-bit image in the first place. I would agree that CS is a highly desirable upgrade for those that want to process converted RAW images.

Have fun...

[ilya]

Mr. Moose -

For total newbies, to go all out with 16 bit, tiffs, etc. may be a bit overkill speaking only from personal experience.

I think though that there is a prevalent fascination with the high end workflow, and that anything else would "cripple" the pictures we take. i think we should be careful with this generalization - the most important thing is to take proper shots in-camera, and rely less on workflow to make up for the flaws in technique.

Let me be even more heretic - I think brand new newbies (and even not so brand new) should just go ahead and shoot Jpegs right out of the camera, using sRGB as a color space. The argument is that its quick and EASY, and because its quick and easy, you are apt to take many many more shots, get instant feedback, and learn faster. You would breeze through postprocessing without being tripped up by limitations of 16-bit, the processing intricacies of raw, figuring out why Adobe RGB looks flat and lifeless, file sizes of tiffs and so on.

As one progresses and learns, then the work-flow would evolve as well. For those who do lots of practicing and reading, that evolution could be less then a month. Others it could be longer. Everyone's mileage varies.

The point is to go full blast at the outset could extend the learning curve significantly with little to no gain in picture quality. I'll go back and extend the old adage "its not the equipment or the workflow, bla bla.."

Ilya

[theoldmoose]

That's true, but the original poster did ask where to learn about processing RAW. In another thread, I wax philosophic about cases (and there are many) where shooting RAW is overkill for the task at hand.

Taking informal snapshots and directly printing them, qualifies as JPEG-friendly, IMO. Once you start to get critical about the technical aspects of what you see coming out of the printer, is about the time to start delving into more advanced topics.

[AJSJones]

No quibbles with all the posts (and alternatives and pros and cons) above. One additional recommendation is that you calibrate your monitor. However you choose to "adjust" your image, the result is on the screen and that's how you judge how you're doing. If your monitor isn't showing the image correctly, all your hard work will have been "wrong" and it will be difficult to print it or for others to see the image as you saw it!

Andy

[theoldmoose]

AJSJones wrote:
No quibbles with all the posts (and alternatives and pros and cons) above. One additional recommendation is that you calibrate your monitor. However you choose to "adjust" your image, the result is on the screen and that's how you judge how you're doing. If your monitor isn't showing the image correctly, all your hard work will have been "wrong" and it will be difficult to print it or for others to see the image as you saw it!

Andy

Excellent suggestion, and one that was overlooked, here. And, at least, the price of decent monitor calibration 'spiders' are coming down, due to the recent surge in popularity of digital cameras.

[playinhockey]

I can't even open RAW files using the PS elements 2.0 that came with the DR. The software dosn't even know the files exist. Any suggestions?

[ilya]

Elements doesn't do that. Either Photoshop plus Camera Raw plug-in, or the new Photoshop CS. Else use the crappy file viewer utility that came with the camera, or get some aftermarket software that's mentioned around here plenty.

[playinhockey]

Why would I think the software that comes with the camera would work? Silly me!

[BobbyC]

Actually you got the Canon software that does work, very painfully slowly, but PS elements was a bonus so you would have something to work on the files after you've converted them.

I highly recommend breezebrowser or Capture One. The problem I have with the PS CS Raw converter is when I open a RAW with it, it always sees a different color temp than BB or C1. When they see 5500 kelvin, the adobe RAW converter sees it as 4850 or something like that. I'm curios if anyone elses has noticed this.

I only noticed the other day when I took a file and converted it with each converter. BB & C1 were always right on but PS CS was always off with the color balance (with no adjustments by me). PS CS looked okay until I compared it to the others. I should note that I always use a custom white balance.

[playinhockey]

Which software would you buy, Breezebrowser or Capture One?

[BobbyC]

They both have good points, but right now, I like C1. Breezebrowser has a nice utility for generating web pages that I use a lot, but the real time preview as well as a few other worklflow related features give C1 the advantage because of a much faster workflow. I think they both produce equal quality files.