RAW Question

i have just started shooting in raw and pp with dpp.When i save and convert raw to tiff i seem to lose a bit of quality and sharpness compared to the orginal raw file what am i doing wrong guys?

Are you saving as 16 bit TIFFs?

I see no change when I reopen my 16 bit TIFF's in Photoshop. However if you are looking at them in a non-colour managed browser, then its just possible the images might loose something.

Personally I don't sharpen in DPP, because I have more control using a seperate plug-in via PS, but many here praise DPP's sharpening.

Yes am saving in 16 bit tiff and veiwing them again in dpp

There should be no loss of quality.
I wonder if you are having a color management problem.

Compare sharpness at 100%, otherwise the resizing for screen algorithm will mess things up.

and another thing to check in DPP is the "Tools menu >preferences >tools pallette tab" and look in the "Default noise reduction setting" section and see if all the sliders for RAW match the sliders for TIFF/JPEG.

Check DPP's preferences for RAW conversions. Put them to wide gamut.

Beaufort 12 wrote in post #6079627
Check DPP's preferences for RAW conversions. Put them to wide gamut.

Why would you recommend that? A very big color space for somebody inexperienced? A space that would have to be reconverted for web posting, commercial printing or even just viewing in a non-CM application. A gamut that is very likely to be well wider than the actual content of the image and will, therefore, be mostly unutilized. And even if the extremes of the space were populated, those colors would be unviewable on any monitor.

The best advise one can give a noob is to stick with sRGB until they have a good understanding of Color Management. Perhaps you should do some reading also.

And finally, the OP asked about an apparent loss of sharpness. How is that connected to color space?

tzalman wrote in post #6079752
Why would you recommend that? A very big color space for somebody inexperienced? A space that would have to be reconverted for web posting, commercial printing or even just viewing in a non-CM application. A gamut that is very likely to be well wider than the actual content of the image and will, therefore, be mostly unutilized. And even if the extremes of the space were populated, those colors would be unviewable on any monitor.

The best advise one can give a noob is to stick with sRGB until they have a good understanding of Color Management. Perhaps you should do some reading also.

And finally, the OP asked about an apparent loss of sharpness. How is that connected to color space?

There is really no reason to use sRGB as working space.

sRGB is not easier, wide gamut is not harder.

Skin tones come much better when using a wide color space.

And, as for saving for the web, you need to change the resolution anyway.

"Save for the web" menu item does the conversion to sRGB and the necessary resolution. It is one of the menu items you need to know when you publish to the web.

For printing to a printer sRGB is not easier, too.

But you possibly meant, because sRGB are less colors, it's easier to use. Well, hooray to technical development!, we don't have to use our crayons any more to color our images. So there's no "smaller sRGB crayon box", which would be easier to carry for younger photography students than the larger "wide gamut crayon box".

Beaufort -
Many people, especially newbies, see a wide gamut color space described as "giving you more colors" and guided by the motto "if more is good, too much is even better," use the wide space without an understanding of what it entails and and what pitfalls they may encounter. Color management is a very difficult subject that requires one or several bookloads of study, but I will make just a few points.

"More colors" is simply untrue. The number of obtainable colors is determined solely by the bit depth to which the file is written. In 8 bits 256 cubed or 16.8 million distinct colors can be written and this applies to every color space. In 16 bit you can represent 65,536 cubed colors, 281.5 trillion, in sRGB or any other space.

"A wider range of colors" is a better description of a wide gamut space. Or more specifically, a range that extends out to more saturated colors. But does the average photographer frequently encounter those colors? Not unless he is photographing plastic toys or flowers, etc. The result is that the outer parts of the gamut are unpopulated while the present colors are crowded toward the middle. A shade of red, for instance, that would be written as R=250 in 8 bit notation (close to saturation) in sRGB might have to be written as 235 in WideGamutRGB in order to leave room above it for more saturated reds (numbers not accurate). If all the photographed colors can be expressed in sRGB or AdobeRGB, in WideGamut the entire tonal range available to the bit depth will not be utilised. Net result, fewer colors, not more.

In a narrow space, since a smaller range needs to be expressed (using a fixed number of steps) the tonal difference from step to step is smaller. Transitions are smoother. For a wide gamut the opposite is true and banding is a definite danger in 8 bit notation. That is why a wide gamut space must be written in 16 bits, so that there will be enough tonal steps to accomodate the width without making it choppy. Even in 16 bit you have to be careful when editing WideGamut or ProPhoto spaces.

No monitor has a gamut as wide as WideGamutRGB. A few quite expensive professional monitors have a gamut roughly like AdobeRGB. So even if you photographed colors that justify WideGamut you won't see them on-screen. If you share the image with anybody and he views it on a non-CM system, even more color data is lost.

High-end printers have a gamut larger than AbodeRGB but less than WideGamut, so if you are using a printer like this exporting from DPP in WideGamut might be justified. [I must note here that I do export from DPP in WideGamut images that I intend to print at home, but as soon as the image is opened in my editor it is converted to Chrome 2000 D65 which is between AdodeRGB and WideGamut and just slightly larger than my printer profile. All other images start and end as sRGB.] Very few newbies have monitors and printers like this. Newbies print on four color inkjets or send their photos to mass production, high volume commercial labs whose workflow is not color managed and must be fed sRGB.

An across-the-board injunction to newbies to use WideGamut is irresponsible, IMO, because it can cause confusion and real loss of IQ as well as unneccessarily complicating their WF. If you can point to a real, not theoretical, advantage in their converting to a wide space I would be very interested to learn about it.

Beaufort 12 wrote in post #6084597
There is really no reason to use sRGB as working space.

IMO there sure is. specially when using 8bpc.

Beaufort 12 wrote in post #6084597
Skin tones come much better when using a wide color space.

If that is the case, something else is wrong. Skintones probabably fall completely in the sRGB color space. So using a wider gamut color space would only make smooth transistions less smooth.

Beaufort 12 wrote in post #6084597
And, as for saving for the web, you need to change the resolution anyway.

No reason to. You might want to change file size (in pixels) however. Resolution (as in ppi) is irrelevant.

Beaufort 12 wrote in post #6084597
"Save for the web" menu item does the conversion to sRGB and the necessary resolution. It is one of the menu items you need to know when you publish to the web.

Only seva for web in CS3 can convert automatically to sRGB.

I almost never use save for web, since I want to retain EXIF and IPTC in the file.

tzalman wrote in post #6085231
If you share the image with anybody and he views it on a non-CM system, even more color data is lost.

Agree with everything you wrote, except this bit.
The color data isn't "lost", but any hope for accurate display is