Help please..

Let me just say I am new to RAW. I have taken some shots with the G 12, edited them in DPP, then wish to save them on my hard drive in windows pictures. When I "save and convert" it saves them but with a much lesser image quality. What am I supposed to do with these images when the high quality shots are stuck in the DPP program. How does one even email or upload them to the web? If I need to just go away from here and read a giant book on RAW processing just say so. Otherwise thanks for any info.

When you do the save and convert it should give you quality options.

It gives me a slider to go as high as 10 on image quality. Should I be converting these to JPG or TIFF? Should I be converting them at all? Is some loss of image quality inevitable? It seems as if I am missing something here.

Check your settings. You have complete control over the type and quality of the output, so you probably have something set suboptimally. (The quality slider in the attached example is grayed-out because I'm saving as TIFF, but if you are using JPG it will be available.)

If you like JPG I think you will find that images are every bit as good as those straight out of the camera except that the have even less compression. Saving as TIFF (my preference) gives big files but no compression.

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Wait! How are you judging "lesser image quality"? If you are looking at both the RAW and JPG files in DPP then the JPGs will look worse unless you go into Tools > Preferences > General Settings and turn on "Display thumbnails at high quality".

Have you tried making your life simpler by shooting in Jpeg.
You will probably find that the photo quality suits your needs just fine.

Yes, my screen looks just like the example you have posted. I have tried several times. The biggest difference I see is that the original RAW file that stays in DPP is noticeably more razor sharp and much more professional. The JPG or TIFF (I have tried both) converts seem to be less in this respect. What "settings" should I be checking?

I am pulling up both images in full screen, not just looking at the thumbnails.
Shockey, (I'm in Boise also!) I have always shot in Jpeg. Since I am new, I have been picking up on a bias toward RAW by most of the people that are sharing some of the wonderful shots I have been looking at. I feel comfortable with my composition and getting better with manual controls. I thought that by shooting RAW I would be able to up the quality of the final product through the added editing tools such as highlights and shadow adjustments and noise reduction with the higher ISO's (not using them much anyhow).

idsurfer wrote in post #11611513
Yes, my screen looks just like the example you have posted. I have tried several times. The biggest difference I see is that the original RAW file that stays in DPP is noticeably more razor sharp and much more professional. The JPG or TIFF (I have tried both) converts seem to be less in this respect. What "settings" should I be checking?

We're gonna get this figured out! And please don't give up on RAW!

Next step: What software are you using to view your JPG and TIFF files? For the most part I do like Windows Live Photo Gallery for quick looks, but I find that it really does a bad job if an image is noisy. In that case, things look much better in Photoshop Elements or MS Office Photo Manager.

Which brings up the question of camera settings, I suppose, such as are you shooting at very high ISO and getting noisy pictures?

Just thinking here ... what version of DPP? I assume the one that came with the G12. I'm using 3.9.3 with my G11.

I am using DPP 3.9 1.0 is what it says in the "About DPP" tab. The shots I took are at 200 ISO and look great in DPP. I have windows 7 and am just viewing them with windows photo viewer. I do not have PS at this point.

Temporarily stumped ... you might try downloading and installing 3.9.3, that is just a wild guess. Don't go away, I'm gonna put up a couple of screen shots to show you what I'm getting. May take a while... looking through my backup drives ...

thanks

One further thought before I post a couple of screen shots. When you produce a TIFF (or JPG) from a RAW file, you are in control of the output, not the camera. So the settings that you use in DPP will definitely affect the results. For one thing, it seems to be a consensus that in the Sharpness drop-down, you get better results by setting it to "Unsharp Mask" rather than "Sharpness." Also, with the G11 I tend to like the USM defaults, where many others seem to think that they are too high. May be due to a difference between cameras (most are using DSLRs).

I recall starting out that I went nuts pixel-peeping and comparing the output of DPP with the output of Adobe Camera RAW and went back and forth with what I preferred. For a while I used DPP to produce a TIFF and then sharpened further in Photoshop Elements, but for a long time now I have used Adobe Camera Raw and Elements almost exclusively. Not because they are better, but because they seem to fit my thought process better. I generally accept ACR's default sharpening and then sharpen further in Elements for output. But, DPP is very good and should be producing perfectly acceptable output for you.

So, here are a couple of 100% crops from the Quick Check Tool in DPP, the first being an unadjusted RAW file, and the second being a TIFF produced directly from that RAW file. I could argue that the RAW is slightly crisper, but then again this is a 100% zoom.

It's a B-17 engine, by the way.

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One more; here's a piece of the TIFF brought back into DPP and sharpened just a bit more (just to illustrate some of the control that you have).

Thought of one more question: have you compared, say, a JPG from DPP with a JPG straight out of the camera? My experience is that they look identical, but the DPP version will be a much larger file.

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Rimmer wrote in post #11611764
One further thought before I post a couple of screen shots. When you produce a TIFF (or JPG) from a RAW file, you are in control of the output, not the camera. So the settings that you use in DPP will definitely affect the results. For one thing, it seems to be a consensus that in the Sharpness drop-down, you get better results by setting it to "Unsharp Mask" rather than "Sharpness." Also, with the G11 I tend to like the USM defaults, where many others seem to think that they are too high. May be due to a difference between cameras (most are using DSLRs).

I recall starting out that I went nuts pixel-peeping and comparing the output of DPP with the output of Adobe Camera RAW and went back and forth with what I preferred. For a while I used DPP to produce a TIFF and then sharpened further in Photoshop Elements, but for a long time now I have used Adobe Camera Raw and Elements almost exclusively. Not because they are better, but because they seem to fit my thought process better. I generally accept ACR's default sharpening and then sharpen further in Elements for output. But, DPP is very good and should be producing perfectly acceptable output for you.

So, here are a couple of 100% crops from the Quick Check Tool in DPP, the first being an unadjusted RAW file, and the second being a TIFF produced directly from that RAW file. I could argue that the RAW is slightly crisper, but then again this is a 100% zoom.

It's a B-17 engine, by the way.

Not to change the subject, but how do you do a screen shot? I see you posted a pic of the convert and save window.