Hard to process photos

Here's one I find rather challenging. It's between 2 and 3 stops underflashed. I get great detail in the lighter faces and in the material but trying to get detail in the darker face is very hard.

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Have try, if you shot RAW, do one convertion for the (1) darker skin tone and one (2) for the lighter skin tone and then stacking the 2 over 1 and use vector mask to reveal the darker skin tone face of 1.

I think I'm going to have to invest in a better piece of software.
At the moment my only RAW converter is Zoom Browser or DPP. Google is pretty decent though. My photo editor is Photoshop Elements 2.0

lostdoggy wrote in post #3361550
Have try, if you shot RAW, do one convertion for the (1) darker skin tone and one (2) for the lighter skin tone and then stacking the 2 over 1 and use vector mask to reveal the darker skin tone face of 1.

Bingo

You don't have to spend a heap of money; I could do what they're talking about with UFRAW and GIMP. If you need it done quick, send me a RAW file and I'll do it for you.

bieber wrote in post #3361709
You don't have to spend a heap of money; I could do what they're talking about with UFRAW and GIMP. If you need it done quick, send me a RAW file and I'll do it for you.

Bravo great offer!

Thanks for the offer. I've just found the recipe function on DPP and it seems to work a treat. Aside from eliminating some red-eye (which I'll do in photoshop) and maybe some more lightening of the faces of the darkest skinned people, it's almost all processed and is looking pretty good.

I shall post a link to the VGA versions when DPP completes the batch. I expect them to be completely different from the first batch I tried with zoom browser. As Windows seems incapable of viewing 30D files, I removed Microsoft's RAW thumbnail utility as it just hogged space and CPU time.

rhys wrote in post #3365382
As Windows seems incapable of viewing 30D files, I removed Microsoft's RAW thumbnail utility as it just hogged space and CPU time.

There is a free download here - http://www.exifpro.com​/other_projects.html - that will allow you to view Canon raw files, including those from the 30D, within Windows Explorer. The MS Powertoy addin stopped at the 20D and 5D(I think) but does not include the 30D.

If you're running Vista then there is a free Codec on Canon's website that can be downloaded to permit raw file viewing in Windows Explorer and Photo Gallery without any other raw processing software.

Alternatively Google's free Picasa2 will read/display Canon raw files.

That's a very nice little thumbnail utility. I like it! Picassa is slow though.

Picasa is slow when you first install and run it because it has to hunt through your drive(s) to find all your photos and populate its database and generate thumbnails. Once the initial load is complete it is usually pretty quick to keep updated. I used to run it quite happily on a laptop of 2001 vintage with a PIII 900 processor and 512MB RAM. Now I have a 2007 vintage laptop with 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo and 2GB RAM and it's plenty quick enough but these days I only use it for the convenience of uploading to my Picasa Web Albums, not editing.

A couple of nice features of Picasa are....

1. Like Lightroom, it performs non-destructive edits of jpeg and raw files, simply keeping a record of your edit instructions in its database. So you can go back to a photo months later and undo your edits or re-edit without any loss of quality. The only downside of that is that if you want to use copies of the edited photos outside Picasa or the Web Albums (see below) you will need to export the photos to new copies with the edits fixed into them. This is much the same as in Lightroom.

2. It has an integrated upload to Picasa Web Albums and you get 1GB of free storage space for your photos and no constraints on dimensions or file size (other than the 1GB storage itself).