my first time taking RAW pics..

[skimmilk68]

Okay couple things i've learned taking RAW... it takes ALOT of memory, and i didnt know i can just upload the RAW pics into my elements 2 and save as jpeg.

so here are my questions..
-The canon program that came with my 300d doesnt have much options (only brightness, contrast, etc... no auto level like PS) so whats the point of taking pictures in RAW when i have to convert it back to jpeg with hardly any fix-up's?

-what's the quickest way to convert the pics from RAW to JPEG? the canon program makes me convert one by one... i cant convert all at same time unless i'm doing something wrong.

-Anybody have a link that explains full details of RAW and what to do with RAW pics? I hear so many people say "thank God i took that pic in RAW" etc... and im left clueless why

[LexLuther]

You should probably download the updated DPP1.5 which is from Canon. It works pretty nicely with RAW. You could also try to use EOS Viewer Utility. I believe both of these programs from Canon will do Batch pretty easily as well, and give you full control of in camera settings such as sharpness/wb even contrast etc.

[Steven M. Anthony]

Okay couple things i've learned taking RAW... it takes ALOT of memory, and i didnt know i can just upload the RAW pics into my elements 2 and save as jpeg.

so here are my questions..
-The canon program that came with my 300d doesnt have much options (only brightness, contrast, etc... no auto level like PS) so whats the point of taking pictures in RAW when i have to convert it back to jpeg with hardly any fix-up's?

The advantage of RAW is that even the few fix-ups you refer to are made without the level of image degradation you would experience with Photoshop. As pointed out by Lex, there are also other programs that let you make more "fix-ups" than the canon software allows.

-what's the quickest way to convert the pics from RAW to JPEG? the canon program makes me convert one by one... i cant convert all at same time unless i'm doing something wrong.

I don't use the canon software (I use the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in via photoshop) any more--but I remember bing able to convert a batch of files. Check the software documentation.

-Anybody have a link that explains full details of RAW and what to do with RAW pics? I hear so many people say "thank God i took that pic in RAW" etc... and im left clueless why


I don't, but check out Bruce Fraser's Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS. That book convinced me to shoot raw all the time (with a few exceptions).

[tim]

I got this book (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/032127878X/qid%3D1104901326/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/102-2432264-6194560) which explains RAW well, and how to work them them in photoshop. I use raw in difficult lsituations, or where I really want lossless compression - say for printing. RAW lets you set the white ballance later, and if you underexpose you can brighten it up very easily too, both much more easily than with JPG and with much less loss of quality.

The downsides are it takes a lot of storage, and if you have more than a few shots in RAW it takes a LOT of time, especially when you're learning. Without that book it'd have taken me days to process a couple of hundred pics, but with it's help it took me a few hours.

[donlavange]

I read an interesting thought on reasons to use Raw files, After you get what you can from the file, it of course remains unchanged. Then sometime in the future, either you (or a descendant) with software we cannot even imagine at this point in time, will be able to recreate an image from that original Raw file and the results could be something spectacular.

Finally, my images will be things of beauty. . . someday.