(I've also posted this on dpreview.com - not everyone reads both boards)
With precipitate timing, I am currently taking part in a production of The Boy Friend in Stirling, Scotland. I have already had a friend take a bundle of photographs during the dress rehearsal, but with the new firmware coming out for the SX1 I took the opportunity to try its RAW capabilities
Let me say from the start that I am not terribly familiar with DPP, so my workflow was to import the pictures in DPP, convert them to 16-bit TIFF and them process them as camera RAW files in Photoshop Elements.
I have two examples. Both taken from backstage, hurriedly. Post-processing is probably far from optimal, so I have put the original CR2 files onto my website. The full URLs are:
http://www.stagepics.co.uk/sx1/boyfriend_048.CR2
and
http://www.stagepics.co.uk/sx1/boyfriend_066.CR2
Okay, on to the pictures. They were taken as RAW+JPG. Here's the JPG of #48 - ISO800, only postprocessing is resizing:
)Postprocessing from RAW (I'm sure I can do better - this doesn't seem all that good) using (amongst other things) Noise Ninja:
)It's not bad, but not great. To be fair, it's probably not vastly different from the best I could get with ISO800 35mm film, but it's not a patch on the SLR.
However, the stage lighting was so bright I thought I might give it a try at ISO 400 - this is image 66 referred to in the links above.
Here's the original. I should have probably mentioned before now that these were on auto white balance:
(the photo page is at http://www.flickr.com …in/set-72157615597735796/
).And here's my reprocessed version:
)So what have I learned? Given the size of the sensor on the SX1, I have to say that I'm impressed. You can come up with a very serviceable picture at ISO400. The RAW files do leave considerable scope for recovery from weird lighting situations...
On the other hand, the camera is far from well-suited to stage photography. The zoom control is too hard to control, and the picture quality is nowhere near that of the SLR.
It comes down to using the right tool for the job, and I believe that the RAW update makes the SX1 an acceptable tool in a wider range situations than it was without RAW. Which has to be a Good Thing.
regards,
/alan
