Marc <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote/replied to: >Beg pardon (and this is a genuine question), but how did you do this >back in the days when you were using slides? Didn't the shot have to be >"spot on" then either, with hardly any ability to change the outcome >afterwards?
For low light bird shooting I used high speed negative film. At least that way I could keep some detail on white birds. >Maybe I haven't looked at RAW enough yet (ok, I know I haven't), but >what major advantages can I gain with it besides setting the white >balance afterwards? And set against the disadvantages of more work, >less storage space and longer write-times? What's there still left to >set on the camera if you can change everything afterwards anyway? Nothing. You only need to frame and shoot. The major adantages using RAW are you can do EVERYTHING afterwards, without messing with all that stuff in the field. Let's see, white balance, complete colour balancing, levels, curves, saturation, sharpness, exposure compensation, contrast adjustment, and many other things can be done. If you shoot JPG, the camera applies your parameters immediately to the file it saves. There is no changing it. There are four parameters, sharpness, contrast, saturation and colour tone. White balance is also set in the JPG. Exposure is set of course. If you shoot JPG in Adobe RGB the four parameters can't be used. You can save three custom parameter sets, and you can do a manual white balance in the field from a white paper sheet or grey card. Plus you can choose from many manual WB presets. If this all sounds like too much, then you understand why I shoot RAW. I much prefer to tweak my images quickly and easily in the computer. That leaves me to concentrate on my subjects, focus, and exposure. Evaluative metering seems to be doing the best job for me, but I do tweak it up and down a bit while shooting of course. Now, having said that, the 10D does a great job in auto white balance and all the other stuff in most average shooting scenes. I just don't end up shooting much in average conditions :-) On the matter of storage space, RAW ends up not actually taking much more space. The reason is because I don't have to keep large TIF files. Capture One LE remembers my settings so I can easily convert later if I need a TIF again. If I do extra Photoshop work on an image I of course do save a TIF. I also do save small JPGs of each image, but the thumbnails are actually enough to tell which image is which. I do save alot of clutter too without all the different file types, I only backup the RAW and THM files. Workflow is simple and fast converting RAW files. I adjust the exposure and contrast, colour balance it, and tweak the sharpness. Takes me about a minute for each image. And I can apply settings to other RAW files with a click. This really helps when you've got a bunch shot in the same lighting. There are of course many other options and tweaks for special images and conditions but they're usually not needed. I think people who shoot JPG are those who have tried using Canon's Fileviewer for conversion of RAW files and gave up. It takes forever and just can't do the same job. Capture One LE gives me an instant preview of any changes, in a colour correct space, in a zoomable preview, etc etc etc. Jim Davis Nature Photography http://www.kjsl.com/~jbdavis/ * **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************
